Let's Be Good Guys
by HVK
Summary: Transformer versions of Finn and Jake, raised as Decepticons, come face to face with the mighty Dinobots and the rebellious Crystal Gems, and are made to face the terrible things their people have done to the galaxy, and decided to what they've been taught: face oppression head-on like heroes.
1. Intro

A birthday gift for my good bud Ri2, inspired by some of my previous alternate universe fics; the basic premise I've worked out for it being Finn and Jake from Adventure Time as Transformers and Decepticons starting to realize that they're _not_ good guys in this conflict, meet up with the Dinobots and the Crystal Gems, sparking a revelation and a decision to do the right thing and be heroes even if it means breaking loyalty to their home.

Some of the canon Transformers (mainly a few of the Dinobots) are also female in this story, mainly Swoop, Sludge and Snarl. Some others might come up. As for continuity, it's broadly similar to my as yet unused personal Transformers canon I'm using for future alternate universe stories; imagine a combination of G1 and Aligned, with some of the look of the movies and an overall larger scope.

Chapters will be posted as they are finished!

Disclaimer: I do not own Transformers, Steven Universe, Adventure Time, any other copyrighted work mentioned or used in this story, and make no claim to any monetary gain thereof.

* * *

Within the boundaries of galaxies from both the Gem Hierarchy and the Autobot Autonomy, there was a young but mighty empire, feared and respected by untold billions of cultures throughout the cosmos, worlds of living machines who thought and felt and lived and loved and preached peace through tyranny.

This was the face of power and safety to their people, and an undying memory of terror and nightmare to the rest of the universe.

This was the Decepticon Empire. One of Cybertron's final children, and a reflection of the all-devouring horror in the stars, that murderous violet blood upon their insignias; born of the conquest, annihilation or assimilation of half a million inhabited worlds and the cyberforming of ten times as many empty or dead planets.

At their edges, they were pressing upon the borders of Apokolips and stabbing at the empire of the Alternian trolls in starts and slices. And also they were making considerable headway through nearly everything else in their way (Daleks and Yeerks and Vilgaxian alike) and yet a comfortable distance from the Quintesson Co-Prosperity Sphere. The Decepticons lived through conquest and war, and they did it well.

Their territory was a place that no one, absolutely _no one_ in the entirely of the known universe wanted to get anywhere near. To live anywhere near the Decepticons, it went, was to die a horrible death sooner or later. You would die and your body would become the soil to grow more soldiers in or fuel to feed them, your world ground up and spat out as metal, and your histories would burn and your technologies broken and no one would ever remember what your people looked like.

The _people_ who lived in the Decepticon Empire, the ones who didn't see what kept their homes upright and their people back from the dead and the wetwork that made it all possible, didn't know about any of that. Their superiors preferred to keep it that way.

If it was a terrestrial zone, there would have been barbed wire and armed guards, soldiers and barricades blocking the way. Big, spooky signs saying things like 'ABANDON ALL HOPE, YE WHO COME WITHIN THIRTY MILES OR SOME SHIT LIKE THAT'. (Just because something is spooky doesn't mean it's intelligently written.) As it was a zone of influence in space, there wasn't anything like that; a few flotillas on guard, ostensibly to fight off attacks; not much more was needed. The terrors of space and the monsters within would see to that.

Threats did not normally come from the outside, here. In the Decepticon Empire, the bots in charge were mainly more concerned with anyone getting out, or being exposed to thoughts outside of what they wanted people to think.

And now...

And now, and on Decepticon planet, a harvested garden world cyberformed in the image of the home world that all their people once came from, a pair of young bots still barely upgraded into their military service frames were looking into the edge of Decepticon space and putting two and two together.

And now, the most famous and feared team of Autobot soldiers was fleeing Gem territory with most precious cargo, taking a detour towards a part of Decepticon space that wasn't supposed to have any patrols at all.

And right here and right now, all this was being...

Not observed, exactly. Watched, certainly, but someone was doing more than watching.

Call it being written down. Some things were meant to happen but only after they already took place, people making choices that twisted fate around like damming up a river until the whole landscape flooded, pens scratching down the curve and weave of history. In a very real way, nailing them down and giving them a substance that entropy couldn't devour, that couldn't be undone. Little bits of good that built up a future.

 _He_ was the one that did the writing.

On a hillside from from the inhabited centers of the little cyberworld, there was a faint and very pleasant sound, like the baying of musical wagon-wolves, and a shimmering in the air, as if of something gently appearing and pushing aside inconvenient molecules with a minimum of fuss. Ripples spread, like the smallest of stones dipped into a river, and clocks spun slightly back and timers ticked forwards and back for just long enough for it to be noticed. It reverted to normal and went unremarked.

There was a solid sort of noise, and abruptly there was a large purple communications terminal upon the hill, somewhat larger than a standard Transformer. The hundreds of tiny creatures making up the hill, like mechanical coral, retracted their fluffy sensors in fright.

Sitting for a moment like a rather flamboyant public callbox, the terminal did nothing. It was _old._ The scars and marks of space detritus marked the exterior, many of those pockmarks older than the stones beneath the mountains of the oldest worlds known to any living thing or storied history. The metal was arranged in the patterns once fashionable in what had been Iacon, the great city-state of Cybertron's philosopher's and leaders, once seat of the Thirteen Primes themselves (and tragically, the birthplace of the Functionalist, whose reign had spelled Cybertron's decay and paved the way for the Decepticon's destructive ways), and the heavy angles and ridged forms even looked like Iaconian architecture; an aesthetic unknown to this world.

The callbox looked like something from another age, another era alien to the people of this world. Few of the Decepticons stationed on this planet would have recognized the architecture; fewer still had even been alive to see Cybertron before that world had gone dark, let alone see the aspects of Iacon in person. It was, effectively, an anachronism but not once that would be especially noteworthy to the people of this world. Just an odd thing surviving long past the time appointed to it.

The box stood up.

First it's entire top section revolved and split into several parts, as its lower section did something similar and multiplied, layers shifting around and turning, dividing into yet more parts. The assemblage moved on gyroscopic joints, providing glimpses of the depths within, and it was so _vast,_ an entire world hidden beneath its surface, older than worlds and time blending with space, and so very _old._

A new form arose, humanoid in shape (though no creature on this planet would recognize it as such, since humans were a long while from making contact with any being of Cybertron), standing upon strong legs; the exterior of something between a cape or a coat settled into place from the broad shoulders of the majestic humanoid robot, the entirety of the new form fairly broad while not being quite as massive as the standard militarized frame of Transformers the galaxy over.

The robot was best described as a he, bearing the aspects of the mech gendered shell favored by much of Cybertron's population towards the end of the Functionalist Era; long cables grew from his face, growing together and long into a massive and unbelievably awesome metal beard like a wizard from a work of hyper-science, and his optics were set deep below articulated metal ridges like the tines of a crown.

Those optics gazed upon the world; they were new, freshly remade less than a couple thousand years ago, but the mind behind them was older than the mantle and stone and life of this world. Its Spark ignited so long ago that there weren't numbers or words to describe the time passed since then.

The indescribably ancient robot, who had seen his people arise and fall and rise again, time after time as stars went out or ignited one by one (and time's passing meant little to him, compared to the stories to be witnessed), gazed upon the gleaming metal of the world around him. He stood in a pastoral region, many shining hills around him. As the suns of the nearby system dawned into a daylight cycle, probing tendrils extending from root clusters and swelled up into mighty metal trees, cautiously spreading arrays of golden leaves and mineral growths shining where Energon was refined from solar power. Turbo foxes zipped about in the distance, assuming the cycle-like alternate modes; curiously, they flew instead of ran, and bore little resemblance to their Cybertronian ancestors. And in the distance, there were villages and towns, many of them centered around larger mecha-trees large enough that they did not need to retract in self-defense, able to power themselves and the local grid without need to recharge.

There was a sigh, pleased but also sad. "A pity," said the robot, he who had taken the name Alpha Trion an eternity ago to suit his present personality and shape, and had not yet changed so much that it would no longer be his. He who had been there at the dawn of the universe, one of the first-forged children of Primus the All-Maker, he who had held the hands of their people as they came home with the scars of Quintessa upon their backs, and he who had seen Cybertron go dark and Primus continue His divine work in less obvious fashions.

And that, it seemed, was that. Alpha Trion turned regretfully from the sight of the beauty the Decepticons had wrecked, and closed his eyes, turning inward and to the past, to what this world had been when the Decepticons had come.

It was a terrible sight.

He saw blood, and endings. Histories coming to an end and snapping with terrible finality. Blood soaking this land, and by the murder of its people was the planet remade into something more suitable for its conquerors. Seven billion lives brought low, beheld all they ever were just vanishing in six phases of conquest, deemed insufficient for the empire's needs. And simply... ending.

With each broken life, Alpha Trion walked with them through time. He saw their every hope, their every joy. He was there when they were born and when they were murdered. For them he witnessed, every single soul who died for their world. He felt as they did as they died, defiant or afraid, hateful or apathetic, afraid of the void or blazing with conviction that pain couldn't mar. Their lives made a story, and these Alpha Trion remembered. Every. Single. One.

It was not within his power to intervene, but it was within his power to stay with them until their time was done, and this he did. For ten thousand years and many more, he stalled time to speak with each one and give them comfort as he could, granting them peace. Some accepted. Others did not. Some he showed the future, and the certainty of renewal and vengeance satisfied some.

And when it was done, Alpha Trion returned to the present, where he had arrived. From the depths of himself, he brought forth two things. The first was a great book, as ancient as he was, seeming to glow with a holy presence. The second was a simple stylus, resembling the quill of a avian mechanimal, but of what sort none could say: perhaps an ancient saurinoid, or a mercury-ibis.

He opened the book to its appointed place, and its page shimmered like light, and seemed without limit. He inscribed those stories, every single one, in a single flourishing swoop. A duty to them fulfilled, at the least.

That matter was done; now time to attend to his reason for coming here. He turned himself to the horizon, to a modest mecha-tree just large enough to support a small home, a fair distance from any nearby habitation or active government control. And right above _something_ nearly as old as Alpha Trion himself.

He settled down, transforming into the alternate mode of a communications terminal, and faded out of view. If anyone saw him, they would mistake him for some abandoned public works.

And he watched.

* * *

The house was fairly old, home to different families or individuals over the ages, eventually growing old or earning merit to a particular job that suited their talents, and getting upgraded to different housing within the cities. So the system went: someone would arise from the periodic sparking fields, or be born from a successful reproduction, come to this empty home, and take it as theirs for a time. (Drone-born tended not to come here; by the time they achieved sapience and blossomed a Spark, they had already found a role in society.)

It wasn't ramshackle, but it was pretty close, not so much a planned structure as an assortment of different modular one-room buildings fastened together around the tree, windows forming at unpredictable places like a water-dweller adapting sieves. The modules tended to shift around, often as new needs arose for the inhabitants, but the present dwellers – a Mini-Con and a Mutacon, both of them born on this world, and registered as brothers on the official census reports – found it stable, and in return whatever limited intelligence made up the house considered them agreeable and pleasant. If it could experience anything at all, it would be disappointed to see them go.

On one of the permanently extruded branches, sitting on a seat-like flat space behind a cluster of solar leaf-panels, was the Mini-Con, frowning seriously as he tapped away at a small external sensor he'd clamped to the branch's Energon reserves.

"Bro!" An aggressively cheerful voice yelled from an open window. "You comin' down or not? They got gladiator smashy games on!"

"In a minute!" The Mini-Con, who might have been called Finn in other universes but here was named Propeller (because it had initially been assumed that his alt-mode was sea-based before he transformed into a sentry turret) turned his head up, frowning at the readings and not really listening.

He was tuning it, now and then, to a distant signal, as he had been asked to do earlier. He was finding it hard to focus on that instead of bringing up some old signals. _Very_ old, and nothing like them had ever been brought up in his education. These particular signals had come from ruins in the deep, untended jungles near their home, where the cyberforming had not entirely took.

Those ruins were not Transformer; not the people of this world nor the works of Cybertron; not even Junkion or Velocitronian or any world known to be of their people. It was weird to think about, unpleasant to consider, but it looked like it had been there _before_ them.

And every single record he looked up seemed to have no idea that they were there. Insistent that they were lies, or tricks laid by Autobot saboteurs to cast doubt for honest Decepticon sparklings like him. Pay no attention to them and get on with your victories, he had been told.

The signals told a different story. A grim and unhappy one. The oldest lessons, the ones supposedly dictated by Lord Megatron himself, warned that control and slavery was the fate of anyone who didn't fight back at the first opportunity. Propeller supposed he was putting those lessons to work.

Everything he had ever been told or shown or taught upon their people – about Lord Megatron and Air Commander Starscream and those ought not to be named, about the dread Prime of the anarchist Autobots and the monsters that served his chaotic whims – told them that the Decepticons were heroes, champions of the oppressed who had seized control from their masters and made a new home for themselves after the Autobots ruined Cybertron and murdered their creator-god (the blasphemy, the shame, the _fury_ it deserved, every Autobot alive deserved to pay for the sacrilege) – it had amounted to certain understandings. But he had old friends, very old friends indeed, and the things they told him... it didn't add up.

Ancient ruins and _signals_ full of blood and terror. First-hand account s that didn't match historical records... which could have been faked in the first place.

He told himself, in the bad times when this all really got to him, he was a _good_ Decepticon. He wasn't a traitor. Not really. This wasn't courting heresy and backstabbing and not-good thinking. He was just looking at stuff like he was supposed to. He wasn't going Autobot. He wasn't a _rebel_ or anything. It wasn't like listening to stories about how weak and inferior meat-things were and thinking about how it didn't make sense for Lord Megatron to say things like that, that wasn't a traitor thing to do. Right?

Sometimes it felt like he was standing of the edge of a cliff, and it all smelt found and the sides coated with bodily Energon and if he looked down into the charnal pit he would never sleep well again, and he couldn't live with himself if he looked down there.

And if he didn't, he would never be able to _be_ himself again. He had to do the right thing, just like a good Decepticon should. Just like Lord Megatron, smashing down the bad guys for peace and liberty. He just wasn't sure which side that was anymore.

In short, he was starting to have _doubts._ And it was kind of freaking him out.

"Bro! C'mon! I got chips, they're gonna burn!"

"Okay, that's good," Propeller said, not really listening and switching the sensor back to the one he'd been asked to check out.

"No! That's bad! They'll explode!"

"Uh huh." (In this household, that was less of a disaster and more of a daily occurrence. The house didn't mind as much as you might think.)

The other resident sighed in disgust. After some noises, as might be made of having to shut a few meal preparation devices off, a great yellow-orange mass popped through the nearest window with some difficulty, floating into the air with a few small jets sprouting from his sides before latching in the tree and walking up it on telescoping limbs.

He walked right up to Propeller, nudging the much smaller Mini-Con meaningfully in the back of the head. Propeller grunted and waved behind his head; the other bot cackled and his hand flowed out of the way like liquid, reforming into a stout hook he jammed into the tree branch to steady himself.

The Mutacon, who was called Jake in other universes but in this one was named Grindjack for reasons best known only to himself (he wanted to go for 'Gutgrinder' but unfortunately it was already taken by a famed pro wrestler/eating contest champ), was basically shaped like a zeppelin or airship; fairly large by Transformer standards, his body a large oval and a heavy-jawed bestial head that was basically a continuation of his main body, all painted a yellow-orange color. On Cybertron he would have been designated a beast-class; his default robot mode resembled a dog-like creature, such as a varren or the werewolf people of Luna Lobo, his audio sensors flattened extensions hanging over the side of his head. Most of the time he walked quadrupedal, as he did now, his limbs powerful and jointed like a hunting mechanimal.

In contrast, Propeller was small, though perhaps not for a Mutacon; while Grindjack was big enough that a standard frame Vehicon would only come up to his shoulder, Propeller wouldn't even come up to that Vehicon's knee; he was stout in spite of his smallness, his frame recently upgraded to a more humanoid one in preparation for future military service, and most of his face (except for his mouth) was made of a emote screen, glowing with the same red optical colors of old Kaon's manufacture. He was also missing one of his original arms, his new frame already lost an arm and currently replaced with a mechaplant-based prosthetic. He didn't often speak of where he had got it or why he refused to upgrade, but the color around it was drained. Unusually for the fashion of this planet, he wore the hide of a slain mechanimal; a great tank-bear, it's overlapping plates and head worn over him like a barbaric cape and hood.

Grindjack poked Propeller again; his finger was nearly as big as Propeller's arm, but despite the size difference the smaller Mini-Con didn't even budge. Grindjack shrank down, not so much compressing his mass as doing... something else entirely with it, reducing himself to about Propeller's size. He poked him again. "Come on, mech, you promised!"

Propeller scowled at him. "And you promised we'd let Screamqueen in on it this time! She gets _bored_ down there-" Grindjack's paw hastily flowed over his vocal emitter, stifling the rest into outraged electronic blips.

" _Not in public!_ " Grindjack hissed. "We talked about this! Geez!"

(It's anyone's guess why 'geez' was an expression on this planet, considering it was a publicly acceptable replacement for swearing on the name of a religious figure none of them had heard of yet. It was a mystery of the universe or a translation convenience in the writings of Alpha Trion.)

Propeller compressed, shamed. Grindjack's hand flowed off him and reformed into a paw. "Sorry, bud. I, uh. I forgot."

Grindjack grimaced. "That's just plain weird. Usually I'm the one pulling goofy stuff like that. You're messing up our whole dynamic, mech, don't you do that!"

Propeller shrugged. "I'll do my best."

"Eh, good enough. The heck are you doing?" He indicated the sensor array on the branch.

"Oh, that? Bhanibhel," he began, referring to a friend of theirs; a very smart and extremely pink Quintesson who had long since defected from her people's regime and traveled across different worlds, apparently indifferent to the dangers of doing this in Transformer lands when you were a Quint. "She's picked up some kind of transwarp signature coming in from... uh..." Propeller struggled to remember what exactly she had said, and he waved vaguely in the direction of what happened to be, given a few dozen light years or so, a prison world used by the mineral-based Gem people. "That way. She wanted me to set up this scanner and I guess it was more fun than I figured watching the lightshow on the screen. Sorry, bud."

"Hey, that's all right," Grindjack said, mollified. "Still wanna watch it? I can hold off on the gladiator stuff if you want."

"Actually, a break does sound pretty cool," Propeller said, hopping off the tree branch and free-falling to the ground.

"Hey, wait up!" Grindjack hopped off, tripling in size and sucking in air, effectively turning himself into a massive balloon and hitting the ground before his friend. Propeller gently dove into him and bounced lightly onto the ground without any harm, and frowned mightily for he had been denied his chance to pacify the ground by hitting it with himself.

Grindjack deflated and Propeller brushed himself off. The two of them went into the nearest module housed on the ground, closing all the doors and windows. That itself was fine, from the point of view of the local satrap who ruled this sector of the planet in Lord Megatron's name, everyone was entitled to keep doors closed.

The hidden door they went through, disguised as a bit of the floor that no one would have seen unless they already knew how to find it, was also fine, if a little odd.

The passageway they traveled through beneath it was not fine, and in fact marginally illegal.

The sheer size of the passageway, going deep below ground and hidden from any sensors or official investigations, was definitely illegal.

The enormous chamber, miles below the ground and big as a playing stadium and older than any but the first Decepticon outposts on this planet, it's ancient metal scarred and burned, was extremely not okay at all. And the sole inhabitant of it would have scarred the satrap silly, like walking face to face with a terrorcon.

And the secret digging operations, gradually moving up and up as Propeller and Grindjack could manage, was so far from okay that in relativistic terms it was coming around to okay from the other side. The two of them had no idea how close they were coming to instant executions the moment anyone official found out, and the two fledgling Decepticons cheerfully innocent of any potential doom.

It was a vast space, dark and _old._ Not as old as the vanished people of this planet (of whom Propeller and Grindjack knew nothing, no sparkling was told of the dirty secrets of Decepticon prosperity), but it was plenty old all the same. The one within older by far. And into this, their footsteps echoing like the 'feed me' bell of a giant monster's lair, came the two inexperienced bots. "Screamqueen, we're here!" Propeller said cheerfully, staring into a darkness big enough that several ranks of Constructicons could have sat there comfortably with room to spare.

At first, there seemed no response. That the place was empty. And then, a sense of movement, shadows moving around darkly colored metal walls. It then became apparent that the metal wall, dwarfing any ordinary Transformer, was not a wall. It was a _leg,_ huge and fairly slender for it's size but no less massive for all of that, ending in dexterous claws as long as a speeder-class. They carved deep into the ground, and then it seemed the entire curve of that dark chamber moved, the bulk of something staggeringly enormous and terrifying, all sharp metal and purple bio-lights...

And all that swept aside, fanning up and out. Not the main body at all, but two massive wings like a bat.

And now, two gigantic Kaon-red eyes bigger than Grindjack's default form glowed in the dark, at a height easily three times as high as a standard humanoid Transformer, staring down directly at them.

And a face like a mixture between a dragon and a bat, detailed like something out of a Chaosbringer nightmare story of the things that dwell in the Pit, it smiled. That was not easy to do with a mouth like a mass of bot-sized fangs with hinges.

Slowly the titanic monster approached them, walking on four legs (the rear set considerably bulkier than the front as a matter of movement), the wings folding up against around a compact central body and metal quill-spines settling down as it came closer and closer. Though 'it' was the wrong word; even the most inept student of Transformer physiology would have recognized the telltale signs and details that this particular monster was female.

And old. Perhaps not as old as Alpha Trion (considerably younger, in the grand scheme of things, but then it was all relative), but older by far than any institution on old Cybertron, and she had outlasted them all.

Propeller looked up into those old, frightful eyes and a maw with teeth sprouting off each other like coral made of murder, and he smiled, sweet and sincere and trusting.

The gigantic monster-thing bumped her head down, her snout bowling both Propeller and Grindjack over. (Kind of like giving someone a shoulder-smack so strong it bowls them over.) "S'up, guys!" She said cheerfully, her voice much quieter than might have been expected. " _Primus_ but I'm bored down here."

"We're working on that," Grindjack said, dusting himself off and looking hurt.

She rolled her eyes. "Uh huh."

"We are! Really," Propeller said.

She turned and sat down, adjusting her wings again. A massive claw tapped at the ground next to Propeller, holding still for as long as it took for him to hop on it and clamber up her knuckle. She glanced down and snorted. "Uh huh. When you're not... what, watching cartoons, punching up horrible monsters and doing other fun stuff I haven't done in... I dunno, _forever?_ "

"And sleeping for solar cycles at a time," Grindjack said cheerfully. "Don't forget about that!"

Propeller glared at him. "You're not helping, bro!"

"I am! I'm providing her moral support."

The terrifyingly monstrous beastformer sighed dramatically with a slight puff of flame; she fanned a wing out and flopped over onto her side with an impact that tossed both smaller bots a couple dozen feet and shook the prison chamber like a mountain had smacked into it. "It must be nice. You know, being up top, _doing things_ and _living life_ and _not being stuck here for eons and eons._ Or having friends that don't want you stuck down here forever. Yeah. I wonder what that's like?"

"Okay, okay!" Propeller stammered. "You can stop the guilt-tripping now! Please?"

The much bigger beastformer, who was named Screamqueen, laughed. "Awright." She gave him another playful poke, even her claw dwarfing him. "I got my torture quotient full for the day. Or whatever time it is."

Both smaller bots sighed in relief. She reclined fully onto her side, spread out her wings and yawned loudly. "So what's on the agenda for today?" she asked, blinking. Her eyes dimmed from red to a teal color. "Figuring that it's no good for any digging today, since we might be getting someone alerted to it. So... what, shows?"

"Yup!" Grindjack said happily. "Gladiator fights straight from the Kaon pits of the old glory-days!" He paused and leaned in, whispering conspiratorially. (Mostly for effect; if he was genuinely whispering, it would be unlikely that Screamqueen could hear him.) " _These were recorded by you-know-who._ "

Propeller shivered. Screamqueen said, "Oh, you mean Soundwa-

"DON'T SAY THAT NAME!" Propeller and Grindjack shrieked, the latter swelling his arms to enormous sizes and wrapping them around Screamqueen's jaws like giant rubber bands.

She rolled her eyes and snorted, blowing them down. "You guys are so jumpy." They were both still shivering.

"Don't even joke about that... _guy..._ " Grindjack said.

"Have you ever even met him?" Propeller asked curiously.

"Yeah," Screamqueen said. She snarled. "Bet this whole mess was his idea."

Both mechs shivered at the thought.

Screamqueen considered the shows ahead. "So, old-fashioned sponsored fights to crowd decision! Sounds good." She shrugged, though it seemed more than a little resigned. "I'm up for that." It was the tone used by someone who thought that they didn't have much else to look forward to, for a very, _very_ long time, so they had better adjust to it and do their best.

Propeller noticed, though it was doubtful if Grindjack did; if so, he thought it more tactful not to take notice. He shuffled away, glancing at Propeller and Screamqueen, and turned his attention to a large set of screens arranged like a great compound mural upon the wall; they activated, turning to the show upload he had already set up earlier.

While he was doing that, Propeller rolled over to Screamqueen, nestling himself somewhere between the great mass of her torso and her elbow as she settled back into a resting position. Though small, he could still make himself felt perfectly well, and she visibly curled slightly around him, sliding slightly towards his warmth; a heat that was at odds with the coolness of her own frame, like an ocean trying to warm itself around a candle that was a lot hotter than it looked (And trying not to smother it).

She looked happier, all the same. If she had been capable of compressing or shrinking herself to a smaller body at all, she undoubtedly would have done it then. But she had not fed on living energon in a very long time, and she didn't have the power to do that, and so made do with allowing the tip of her long tail to curl around him like a living blanket. She lifted her tail up for Grindjack to curl up beneath as well; her feelings for the beastformer might not have been the same _type_ as for Propeller, but it was affection and love all the same.

* * *

Clearly, the three of them presented a rather unusual household, particularly for Decepticons in general, and thus an explanation would be merited.

Propeller and Grindjack had settled down here to roam as they would, which was what young Decepticons were often seen to do until experienced enough to enter military work. Very early on they had discovered this home and settled in when they were still young enough not to be counted in the census reports in case they off-lined through accidents, and explored the surrounding area, much of it was still showing signs of being another sort of world (attributed to infectious growths from alien worlds, and the inconsistencies bothered Propeller too; Grindjack didn't care too much as long as it wasn't straight-up evil and that could never happen, right).

And through these adventures, they had found chasms in the earth, deep tunnels into the soil; _soil,_ not metal granules or shifting plates. Huge tunnels that had been dug there a long time ago and collapsed when their job was done, and yet a few of them had opened up again over the ages.

And through those, they had found the ancient prison below the ground, and in doing so opened it up, and woke the monster inside. Only she wasn't a monster. Not really.

Her name was Screamqueen, an ancient Predacon, a sub-species of Transformer predating the Quintesson-made, she had claimed to have been there when Megatronus Prime himself had walked Cybertron. Always taught that Megatronus had been a figurehead and legend to be emulated as Lord Megatron had, Propeller found it pretty surreal to hear him being talked about like an actual person.

A person who had done... _terrible_ things.

She had been imprisoned down there a long time ago; she wasn't sure when or how or why, she only remembered being fought and beaten, and slightly aware of the long passage of time, and then there had been the two bots, there for her when she woke up.

Maybe they should have reported her or told someone. Both of them believed that you helped someone in need, and no one needed help like someone who was trapped down a place for forever. It had to have been a mistake, anyway, Grindjack had insisted. No way they'd lock up somebody just because they were big and scary or powerful. Right?

So the digging had begun; there was no entrance large enough for her to escape, so over the years they had begun digging, carefully excavating tunnels large enough for her to navigate until she could make her own way to the surface and escape into the wolds or plead her case. As he'd grown older and... _closer_ to the Predacon, Propeller had entertained notions of _staying_ with her. Maybe she'd stay with him. Or he'd go with her.

Thinking like that made him feel like he didn't really have a grasp on his own life again, but it was nicer than worrying that the Decepticon High Command's history was _lying_ to him.

And maybe it would take forever, digging. Maybe many years more. And they didn't have too many left before they were good enough to get conscripted, and off Screamqueen would be alone again, and maybe they would never come back to get her all the way out. She liked to remind them about this when they brought her Energon, maybe because she was genuinely scared of that, or she just wanted to mess with their heads. Maybe a little of both.

But that was something they would deal with, a little bit at a time.

It was a good life, all things considered.

* * *

And here and now, things seemed pretty good.

Together the three of them settled down, and watched the shows, together; with camaraderie and happiness and peace.

At least until the spaceship hit their house.


	2. Downed Ship, Freaked Out Li'l Cons

Disclaimer: I do not own Transformers, Adventure Time, Steven Universe, any other copyrighted properties present in this story, and make no claim to monetary gain thereof in any way whatsoever.

* * *

The default assumption of global surveillance centers is that they're probably pretty exciting places, if not ones you want to be anywhere near.

Imagine huge, cavernous complexes, filled to the brim with disappeared people still being grilled and sweated for everything they might possibly know. Vast hard-copy file bins cataloged to microscopic specifics, bearing data that could spell the doom of peace for the awful secrets they carried. Gigantic carbon-based terminals (organic computers having enormous processing ability, even if they didn't live that long) computing every single factoid on every single person who had ever lived on that planet in the last several hundred years since the Decepticons had occupied it, surveying all they ever knew or said and calculating what it all meant. Huge armies of spies and secret agents training for wetwork and planning unspeakable deeds in the name of the state's good name and service.

The reality is that the _essence_ of a lot of that stuff is sometimes true. It's just usually presented in a pretty boring and mundane way.

The global center of this particular planet was an airborne space station located in geosynchronous orbit, considerably smaller than even the most modest station in common use ('civilian use' not being applicable as civilians, as such, didn't exist in Decepticon culture). It _was_ pretty spiky, though this was standard for Decepticon architecture during one of the periodic phases of Cybertron nostalgia, as had gone around when this station had been constructed; it looked a lot like the head of a morningstar, shorn of it's handle.

Closer inspection suggested that the 'spikes' were actually a combination of landing docks for the workers), in the case of the longer spikes, or processing centers for the shorter ones, most of it open to space barring the bare minimum to keep things inside, just because this was the cheapest possible option. Here and now, one of the flight-capable workers had just docked.

The docking runways were generally kept clear, except for workers and agents leaving or, as the case usually was, arriving; they almost never dealt with matters personally, simply analyzing information and sending it to the appropriate departments around the planet if it met certain unfortunate criteria. Normally, no one working there saw any kind of action or what the results of their information analysis caused, which was how High Command preferred it. 'Departmentalize and compartmentalize, and we avoid panics over the less acceptable aspects of running an imperialist government', Shockwave the great mechasurgeon had once said when he had thrown in support for this development, millennia ago.

The jet flying in was a small one, little more than a power core, an engine and flight control surfaces arranged into a broadly triangular form; it's designs were minimalistic and decorations or markings barely present besides the usual Decepticon insignia upon a wing. The small jet slowed descent and flipped at the designated area, transforming at the apex and landing ably; what then stood up was a manufacture-standard Vehicon drone, somewhat smaller than the standard and likely intended for use as a scouting or logistics scanner. (Manpower being just about the one thing the Decepticon Empire was not short of on any given occasion; it was usually cheaper to make someone designed to do a specific job than it was to retrain anybody or build a non-sentient device.) Overall fairly slim, their torso having a big hole where the engine was positioned horizontally right in the middle of their chest.

The drone, who was originally designated Unit Ten-Thousand-Eighty-Sixth, nodded to a few coworkers in the area and promptly went to an elevator that took the drone to the assigned floor, and to the nearest cubicle, plugging into the provided terminal via cybernetic interfaces installed into the organic machine. The overseer observed the drone shuddering briefly at the wet and squishy noises of the interfacing and nodded approvingly; revulsion at the despicable organics was considered an excellent sign in emergent intelligence and an essential part of maturity. (No one could easily articulate why it was so; it was just how Decepticons were supposed to act. Prejudice is rarely well-explained beyond justifications that boil down to 'that's just how it is'.)

There the drone plugged into the available information and analyzed. This particular drone, who wasn't all that relevant to Alpha Trion's account of these events barring a single point, was nonetheless still a person and provided an important look at Decepticon culture: the drone-birth of Sparks.

It was known that Transformers typically placed little importance on their physical frames or bodies. They were given life by their Sparks, their life force and power sources; their very souls. Thus most forms of reproduction involved igniting them; in ages past it had been the main thing to summon them directly from the life force of Primus All-Maker, but alas Cybertron was gone and the Well of All-Sparks silent, and this was no longer as easy as it once was. Lesser wells had been ignited, and it was easy to do so, but it required enormous amounts of resources; entire planets could be harvested to their very cores and only provide a scant amount of new Sparks. Physical reproduction was also increasingly common, but considered somewhat disreputable by Decepticon elite society; that was something for organics, the feeling went, and it was at times risky for the bots involved and the resulting children were often very different from the parents or donations. In terms of reliability and practical usage, by far the largest number of new Decepticons came from drones.

The subject of drone sapience was a long-time matter to Cybertronians; indeed, it was an ethical question to be considered if you were, say, constructing a drone meant to work in a very boring and unpleasant environment. Simply put, drones _started_ as non-sentient machines based on Cybertronian physiology, programmed to do specific tasks and with no Sparks of their own. But over time, given exposure to different situations and developing accordingly, they got more complex. Their limited AI got less limited over the years, grew more intricate and began to genuinely look at the world, asking questions of itself.

Eventually, if allowed to do so, drones would one day realize that they _themselves_ were alive. Apart from the rest of existence, intelligences unto themselves. And Sparks would ignite within their frames, their bodies reconfiguring minutely to accommodate it, and the drone would be a new Transformer.

The drone-born were perhaps the largest source of Decepticon lives; they weren't too expensive to make in bulk, they became people through experience and thus made fine soldiers or workers in the meantime, and by the time they were fully actualized they had usually accomplished a fair bit.

And this particular drone had already developed a Spark, but had not yet been seen to demonstrate all the features of a true Transformer, as determined by Decepticon High Command ages ago when the drone-born were believed to be the most reliable source of new troops, and so had not been officially permitted a name. (It wasn't a coincidence that the traits they filtered for was blind obedience, a lack of questioning, and a tendency to follow the stated rules without worrying too much about them. Many drones who hadn't been legally recognized as Transformers by Decepticon law were fully sapient and intelligent, but were relegated to second-class citizens because they were asking the wrong questions or didn't have an approved psychological architecture.) The drone liked to go by Tenasith to a few friends, as a contraction of the serial number stamped upon the drone's forehead. (This had originally been Tenathoaisith, but the drone had shortened the name after much urging from friends.) The drone was also neuter-gender, a not uncommon development among many Transformers in this era, sometimes as an aesthetic but more often because it simply felt right to them, much as other Transformers identified as mechs, femmes or something else.

Many Decepticons, not just on this planet but on many all over the Decepticon Empire, had the same unfortunate situation as this drone. Multiple Vehicon support groups were attempting to improve their lot and raise them to the same overall level as ignited protoforms, but Lord Megatron didn't appear to care much as long as they got the job done, so the groups were not punished or thwarted. (And also they didn't get laughed at as much as people who dared to suggest that maybe organics were just as much people as robots were.)

Tenasith preferred not to think about the situation they had to live with and just kept going on with the job at hand.

A co-worker came by, another Vehicon who turned into a cyclebike, presenting as a mech. He clapped Tenasith on the shoulder-joint to get their attention. "Hey, c'mon."

Tenasith stirred, rising from the fascinating depths of data analysis. (It was more than a little like dipping your brain right into an information pool and stirring.) "Eh? What?"

The biker (and no one can be a more literal biker than a Transformer can) raised a forearm tendril; it twisted towards the nearest refueling station. "We're up for Energon break."

Tenasith stared. "But I just punched it."

"That was like... forever ago." The biker's faceplates crinkled in concern. "You really oughta watch how deep you get into data analysis. You know what they say about archivists who get too into their work!"

"Yeah, yeah, I s'pose so." Tenasith sat up. "Just a minute. I got pinged with some kind of impact in one the rural sectors. Not sure if I should call it in or not."

The biker leaned in, interested. "Really? What do you think it is?"

"Not sure," Tenasith admitted. "Could just be a broken down satellite hitting the ground; it might hit someone's house. It could be a meteorite... but the angles too smooth to probably be anything natural. It could be natural, but I'm not sure. It might be something crashing."

The biker frowned, faceplates angling downwards like cave spikes trying to crawl off the walls. "What, like a downed spaceship?"

"Yeah." Tenasith spoke extremely tensely. "Like that."

"Wouldn't scanners have picked up a ship in our region? Or it already be put into your data feed?"

"Not if it was shielded from scanners, and re-entry damaged that shielding." A more worrying possibility occurred to Tenasith. "Or if they weren't supposed to be here."

They both went quiet. _All_ ships were announced if they got within firing range of the planet. No exceptions, not even for military craft.

Only one sort of ship wouldn't announce their presence; the illegal kind.

"Trajectory means it could be from Gem space," Tenasith said. "But shielded from our scanners would require familiarity with our tech, so it could be... you know. _Autobot._ "

The biker nodded, segments shivering. "Holy scrap. Sounds like too much of a risk not to report. If it's nothing, you'll look a bit silly, but if it's not..."

"If it's not," Tenasith agreed. "It could be something _really bad._ " They paused. "...Okay. Just called it in. Not our problem anymore."

"Can we go to lunch now?" The biker begged. "I'm freaking out a little. Okay?"

"Yeah, same here." Tenasith disengaged from the terminal and both Vehicons left to the refueling station, trying not to be too worried.

* * *

There was a lot of smoke, rubble and ruin around Propeller and Grindjack's house, though fortunately their house itself was totally intact. The home-tree was still leaning away from the crash, a massive streak of entry heat-scarred metal melted to glassy lumped flattened by the force of impact, going _through_ the next hill over like a big scoop taken out of it.

The grisly streak kept going, on and on, through the next hill and the one after that, and so on for quite a long distance. Mecha-trees that hadn't gotten out of the fast fast enough lay in melted bundles here and there, solar-panel leaves fragmented or embedded through solid objects; the trees hit so hard, the leaves had flown off them like shrapnel. Everywhere the ground was deeply scored, burned even where the falling thing hadn't struck it.

And it was a pretty big trail.

A large yellow ball was rolling around it, following it and moving at high speeds: Grindjack shifted into a spheroid form, inner joints contorting his current alt mode to rotate it's sections incredibly fast and generate immense speeds with pin-point control. (At least that was the idea. In practice fine tuning and agility were _not_ part of his strengths.) Something rather smaller appeared mounted at the top of the ball, on one of the sections that didn't move and wildly scanning for threats.

Neither Propeller or Grindjack, both in alternate modes, were capable of verbally speaking, so they broadcasted to each other directly, much of it extremely loud and not especially coherent. Propeller was incredibly excited and hoping it was something to fight, Grindjack a little more reserved and eager to flee if it came down to it.

They followed the trail for a considerable distance. Propeller noted that the trail was already many times wider than their house, and it was getting deeper still. It dwarfed buildings, as is. Grindjack did not consider this at all helpful in keeping him from panicking.

The trail seemed to come to an end and they crested over a hill. Grindjack came to a stop and detached Propeller from atop, and the smaller Mini-Con landed adeptly on the ground, still in his alternate mode: a sentry turret, easily twice the size of his robot mode and broadly the size of a standard Vehicon's head, well-suited to be a mounted turret for any suitable Transformer. The central chassis was broad and well-armored, mounted up on several legs that could be adjusted for a new shooting angle or footing, and several wheels tucked in. (There was some mecha-plant material, his arm distributed around his form.) On either side there were rocket multi-pads, bulging with explosive ordnance, and crowning his top was an unusually massive mini-gun made of at least three smaller guns, with no less than seventeen barrels combined.

Propeller did not transform into his robot mode, being just as comfortable in his alt mode; ironically, depending on his situation, his robot mode might have been more effective in a fight, at least at close range. The anchoring legs retracted and his wheels extended, allowing him to roll forwards a little over the hill. He looked down, various sensors seeing what was there, and he stopped dead still.

Wordlessly, he started to roll back.

Wheels weren't dealing with the upturned metal dirt too well. Grindjack assumed his default robot mode and loped up, adjusting his rear legs for a bipedal stance and caught Propeller with one paw. "Dude! Clamp down, you're gonna slip!"

Propeller didn't respond verbally, he beeped erratically. Written down, it would have involved a lot of exclamation marks without much content.

"Dude! Clamps!"

Propeller obediently extended his legs into the ground, claws stamping in; he stopped rolling back and became steady.

Grindjack sighed in relief (a habit picked up from watching organics do that) and patted his brother awkwardly on a rocket pad. "Alright. What's got you all freaked out! And gimme some words, awright?"

Propeller trembled; not shaking in fear or anything, but trying to force a transformation. His components rattled and came loose, and so did he; he rolled down the hill, reconfiguring into his robot mode, reducing drastically in size; not shrinking, but _compressing_ his alternate mode, so that his robot mode was vastly denser and tougher than it otherwise would have been. (Many halves the size, eight times the punch.) He hit the ground in his robot mode and clambered back up, gesturing and babbling incoherently. "It's, it's _bad,_ mech! It's bad, this is _really, really bad!_ "

Grindjack snorted. "Oh come on," he said as he turned around and looked down into the entry crater where the sky-thing had come to rest. "It can't be that bad OH MY PRIMUS WHAT THE FRAG."

Propeller climbed up beside him. Despite the situation, he still had the presence of mind to frown and smack Grindjack on the side (which was about as high as he could reach). "C'mon. Watch the language!"

Grindjack wasn't listening. He looked down into the crater, his jaw hitting the floor. Literally. It extended all the way from his face and dinged against the ground with a little echoing sound.

The crater sharply angled down, the burned metal dirt not only melting but stamped down under the weight of the falling object, which appeared to have flipped over at this point before finally dragging to a stop a little further along. The impact was so hard the ground had cracked open, the inner metal smashed up into pieces and the root systems of cybermatter it generated breaking away. There was something else there spilling up; dark granules, softer and weird looking-

"Dirt," Propeller said again. "That's dirt, in there. Soil. Like in those ruins we've found."

"...Everyone says that stuff never existed on this planet," Grindjack said slowly.

Further along the sides of the crater, the ground had smashed open completely; there were _buildings_ there, smooth and rounded, and shining even in this dim lighting from the mecha-trees overhead (what little hadn't been uprooted or smashed) and the angles of the crater. They were truly old buildings, radiating the chill of ages, cracked and blasted from ancient warfare. Propeller saw odd shapes there in the dark; small things, shaped a little bit like Transformers but the stature was wrong, they were shaped differently, even from the standards of a species as morphologically divergent as their own. Under the shadow of the vast thing that had fallen from the sky, they looked sad and somehow... out of place.

Getting a strangely sickening feeling, Propeller assumed his turret form again and rolled down the crater as carefully as he could. Grindjack made it to the bottom first, inflating himself like a balloon and just bouncing all the way down. They met there next to a cluster of strange stone that Propeller poked awkwardly with his turret gun. "These are rocks," he tight-beamed to Grindjack. "Like... what you find on star-made worlds. Like, uh... how do you say it?"

"You mean like planets what get formed from stars attracting matter and stuff like that?" Grindjack said. "Lava cools and makes rock?"

"Yeah, that."

Grindjack stared at it, assuming his default mode. "What's _rock_ doing on a planet like ours? Our world was cyberformed from a place without anything like that."

"I guess it could have survived the process," Propeller said uncertainly.

Grindjack scowled at him. "I don't like how you said that, mech."

"I don't like thinking about it." They moved along to one of the people-looking things Propeller had seen before. It was still and unmoving; not a person, they saw now, but probably the remains of one. An organic, it seemed, signs of a chitinous exoskeleton worn away by the passage of time, leaving behind a shell still connected together by decay-resistant tissue. "Remains?"

"I'd guess so," Grindjack said. "But remains of what? And where the heck did they come from?"

Propeller pointed uncertainly at the vast hulk that had crashed down, making this crater. "From that?" For it was undoubtedly a spaceship- no, a _starship,_ traveling great distances.

Grindjack considered that, and shook his head. "Nah. The whole thing's still sealed up nice and tight. No one, or nothing, came out of there."

"So... they were already here?"

"Looks that way."

"...Okay this is really freaking me out, mech," Propeller confessed. "Like super bad."

"Me too, bro."

They both stared at the buildings below the ground, and the bodies falling away from there. Falling from the opened up earth.

They had been _buried_ there, lost and locked away. Below earth that wasn't even supposed to be on this planet.

Propeller looked uncertainly up at the ship, massive and imposing, more than anything he'd seen in his rural life; he'd only been to the big cities a few times, and usually only for a few weeks at a time with collecting bounties or something like that. He'd never seen any ship like this: it was _huge,_ still designed for brief trips from planet to planet and with a economy of design like it was meant only for a small crew. Perhaps it simply was made for massive robots.

The two of them took a careful look at it, getting ready to run just in case anyone came out. As best they could tell with the ship half-buried and upside-down like it was, the whole craft was oblong-shaped, wider at the back (perhaps for crew quarters) than at the front, which was probably the bridge. Most of the crew section was buried. At the the side they could see was something wide and swept, perhaps an engine of a kind. A few wide shapes, like fins or armor plates, hung from the sides, many of them broken loose in the crash. The paint job was hard to tell under the crash damage, but it seemed mostly gray with gold highlights.

There were no insignias, no faction declarations, and no broadcasts coming from it. No way to tell if it was a friend or foe. (Most Decepticons are taught pretty early on that any given thing is one or the other, and very easily shifts depending on current circumstances.)

"It's a mystery ship," Propeller said. He glanced at Grindjack with a grin, his sense of adventure overwhelming what little caution he had. "Let's go inside! ...Hey, where'd you go?"

"Yo!" An orange-looking trail was oozing into a barely perceptible crack opened up from the crash; perhaps only something as adjustable as a Mutacon like Grindjack could have exploited it. He flowed into it and disappeared. A few moments later, a section of the wall slid away to make a door, and standing behind it (technically, on the ceiling of the flipped ship) was Grindjack. He waved. "What are you waiting for, mech? Get up here before you miss anything spooky!"

"Awesome!" Propeller hopped up with him, pleased that the power of the ship was still on. The corridor was illuminated, and he hoped it meant that whoever there was still alive. They might be evil organics, and then they could fight them and be heroes. They could be Decepticon forces, in need of assistance, which would also be heroic! Or they might be extremely lost tourists, and Propeller and Grindjack could direct them onwards.

Or, Propeller supposed, it could be an _Autobot ship._ In which case, he and his brother would die horribly.

He paused. "Hypothetically speaking," he started to say, noting how very _large_ the vaulted walls above him were, and the heavily reinforced floors overhead. The metal had not been forged so much as bashed into shapes that could resist the impacts of massive feet with enormous amounts of mechanical muscle power behind them. There were marks in those crosshatching bars like, like _claws._ Big claws. Bigger than he was. His sections rotated and he swiveled them back into place. "Uh. Hypothetically speaking?"

"Speaking about what?" Grindjack opened up a gigantic box mounted to the wall, probably itself as big as one of the state-issued repair vats they slept in. He was messing around with something inside that Propeller couldn't see from the angle or lights that were suddenly flickering; maybe the power hadn't been so well-maintained after all. The ship _had_ crashed right into the ground. "And where'd you hear words like that?"

"Cartoons," Propeller said.

"Ah."

"Look, this is a _really_ big ship." Propeller took several steps back, revolving in place to get a scan of the whole area; it was probably inherited from being a sentry turret. (Your alt mode, natural or otherwise, _did_ affect your behavior more than Decepticon propaganda told him; modified or left to evolve on its own, your alt mode was _part_ of you. This wasn't a surprise to him, most Decepticons didn't pay much attention to those bits in the education feeds anyway.) "Like... bad news kind of big. And we've seen big things that could fit in here before."

He pointed below the ground. Where their big friend was still lazing about and waiting for them to come back and tell her what the big noise was. "Like _her_." (That seemed general enough not to get attention if anyone was spying on them.)

Grindjack's eyebrows inflated to big rubbery blocks on his face, squirming over his optics. "Whattaya saying?"

Propeller squatted down over one particular mark on the floor. While most of the floor had been actively repaired and patched up – implying that whoever dwelled here was aware of the damage and did routine maintenance, meaning that whoever made those marks was let to roam free – some of the marks were more recent than that. He put a hand into the claw mark. Big, wide, square.. but still sharp. Not like a predator's claw, not shaped like Screamqueen's claws, but still big and spooky. In fact... he frowned, thinking hard.

It reminded him of some of the bigger mechanimals he'd seen documentaries about; mega-elephants, or thunder-hippos, dwelling in the plains and their massive hard nails leaving marks a lot like this. Not claws _designed_ for a carnivorous life style. But these marks were sharper than what he'd seen. Modified for a carnivore, maybe.

It didn't bode well. Propeller looked around the room again as the lights went a little brighter (perhaps the power source being distributed properly or something like that). Long and wide, but not especially spacious, nearly every available square space of the room was occupied by massive wide tables as high up over him as their home; worker's tables for engineering work, he saw tools similar to stuff in their home for maintaining things but on a scale for giants. Most of the place, especially around the door they'd entered in, was filled by big round things he took a moment to recognize as lockers.

 _Really_ big lockers. They went from floor to ceiling like columns, a few of them opened from impact and filled with rotating inner sections, massive weapons affixed to them. Thunder-hammers, thermo-swords, knuckle-worn claws as long as blades, massive swept swords too heavy for any Transformer to wield but with _one-handed_ grips... and guns. He couldn't forget about the guns. There were some _awesome_ guns there. He stared in awe at an assemblage of grenade launchers piles together with multiple rapid-delivery barrels, energy-burst launchers with attached melee blades, piles of automated sentry turrets not so different from his own alt mode but folded up into inactive spheres, miniguns as big as Mini-cons scale buildings with dozens of barrels each (the barrels themselves equipped with raingun acceleration coils).

"Who could even lift those guns and fire them without tearing their arms off?" Propeller wondered.

"I dunno," Grindjack said, coming over with stomping sounds; Propeller turned around in time for Grindjack to come over, shifting into a gigantic bipedal form so big that Propeller didn't even come up to the lowest of his multiple knee joints; he was holding the mysterious object he'd rescued from the locker, one of those miniguns Propeller had been looking at. It was still far too large for him to hold correctly, despite now being just barely strong enough to use it; it was just plain unwieldy for him and he had sprouted four extra arms to deal with it, holding the gun steady. Two of those arms had mutated two extra arms off the wrists, feeding a case of crowd control ammunition into the barrel. "Combiners, I guess. But even these guns would be too smaller for them. Maybe Predacons? Or really big beastformers that turn into something snarly and awesome."

"I'm starting to feel like maybe I'm in over my head a little OH MY PRIMUS WHAT IS THAT?!" Propeller skittered off excitedly to a particularly impressive sword: held up next to the exit door on a very large locker that also had a little crown hanging off it (a little psuedo-metal crown, like something any sparkling could get at a fast energizing diner). Grindjack came over in the middle of grousing about what kind of weird interstellar invaders even _bothered_ bringing anything but live ammo and whistled in amazement at the sword.

It was quite frankly the most awesome sword ever (at least in their limited experience of utensils of stabbiness). In width and in length it was bigger than them put together, big enough to cut their tree home in half with a single cut without the slightest effort, wider at the curved tip, a massive single-edged blade similar to the thermo-sword design but _older_ by far. Heat coils were housed behind the cutting edge, conducting frames running tandem with the blade itself, and it bore countless scars and marks from many battles. There were sigils and markings upon it, glyphs in the languages of their people: though if it was Cybertronian glyphs or a colony world, neither could said. Propeller, a keen scholar of history in certain narrow areas, thought they looked sort of familiar.

They scuttled around it, chirping excitedly. "Awesome, _awesome awesome AWESOME!_ " Propeller crawled up Grindjack's back, ignoring the larger robot's complaints (and making sure not to brush against the gun), climbing up his back and onto his head and then bouncing off onto the locker, clinging lovingly to the sword's handle. "Big sword!" Propeller squealed. "Big sword, I love this big sword!"

"Careful, bud, you don't know where it's been!" Grindjack called from down.

"Don't care! It's mine now, I call dibs!" Some measure of proper Decepticon propriety seized him. "Uh. If the people here are dead, that is. Or we gotta fight them. In that case it's loot! AND I CALL DIBS."

Grindjack growled, he totally should have called it first. "How are you gonna lift that thing, anyway? The hilt is bigger than you are!"

"I don't want to _use_ it," Propeller said, angling himself into the locker and ducking under the sword, lovingly trailing a hand across the ancient inscriptions. It was bugging him; he had seen these glyphs before somewhere, he just knew it. "I just wanna have it. It'd be _so cool!_ Or I could give it to Scream- uh, our super-tall friend. This looks just the right size for her to use."

Grindjack regarded it appraisingly. "Huh. I think you're right, she could probably lift it easy. Not sure if she'd go for a sword, though. Think she'd prefer something with a bit more weight behind it."

"It'll be a sword that's _on fire!_ Who doesn't love flaming swords?!"

"I dunno. Boring people, probably."

Propeller edged past a few other weapons in the locker, all bigger than him – knuckle-claws, cases of ammunition, an energon-shield projector, and for some reason a booklet entitled _How To Overcome Your Fear Of Tiny Housepets_ , and noticed a small data-slate, about as big as he was; perhaps who used this locker was so massive, even their data-slates needed to be scaled up just to hold them right. He placed his foot upon the front, looking for a button. It was hard to find, there weren't any of the usual set-up he had always seen in every bit of technology he'd used in all his life. The technology of the Decepticon Empire tended towards aesthetics over strict function, demonstrating their ability through flourish; some devices required an expert timed set of presses on sensitive surfaces before it would response. In contrast, this looked... _crude._ A very simplistic array of buttons, a screen projector and a interface display, and nothing more. Very solid, extremely hard wearing and he supposed easy to understand, but it looked obnoxiously plain to him. Made to endure and be easily understood by a diverse population, but the rounded look of the whole thing was kind of weird; there weren't any spiky bits or angles at _all._

Finding the most likely looking power button (the biggest button, at the top of the device), he pressed his foot down hard on it. The screen powered on, scrolling down something he wasn't able to understand at first; it looked like it was running a basic application. Perhaps this wasn't a universal mini-processor like what his people used, but something meant for a very specific task. "Hey, I found something else in here?"

"What's that?" Grindjack asked, stretching up on his legs. He created another set by branching off his main knees to steady himself like a tripod with more legs, and growing his legs larger to compensate for his height. "Did you find food? An awesome dagger? A gun that shoots guns that shoots guns? A tiny person you can play video games on?"

"Mech, I wish! I'm not really sure what I'm looking at." he turned aside so that Grindjack could, lowering the gun to the ground, shrink enough to squeeze past the giant sword and step into the locker with him. Grindjack got his footing and sucked his legs back into his body, standing up properly and shrinking to about half Propeller's size.

"Looks like a list," Grindjack said, tilting his head. "I'm seeing names, statuses... I think it's saying whether these people are dead or not."

"Really?" Propeller scrambled over to where Grindjack was so he could see properly. True, the screen was scrolling down, there were glyphs and lettering, but it wasn't something he could read. It _looked_ a bit like Imperial High Standard, the common language of the Decepticon Empire's official use and mainly in service by the higher merit classes, but in the same way that an organic looked like a robot; sometimes there was some resemblance, sometimes it was scarily similar, but mostly it was so shockingly alien and just plain _off_ that the resemblances were honestly kind of scary. Propeller stared at it, dumbfounded. "Um. I can't read it."

"You can't?" Grindjack swiveled his head over to him. "Really?"

"No. I, uh, I don't really know what I'm looking at."

"You totally should have taken the linguistics courses before you get to them in military education, like I did," Grindjack said, clucking his teeth in disapproval. "Learn to read and speak a few languages, mech! You're gonna look real silly trying to bring culture to the uncivilized edges of space and save the aliens from falling apart without us, when you can't understand a word they're saying."

"What's the point in learning it?" Propeller retorted. "Universal translation protocols are standard issue programming for military service."

"No shame in learning!"

"Nope! Sounds boring!" Propeller crossed his arms, scowling. "So, uh, what does it say?"

"I dunno if you wanna hear that," Grindjack said cheerfully. "You might have to _learn_ something. Hear a spooky foreign language or two. Sure you want that on your conscience?"

"C'mon, please!"

Grindjack laughed. "Awright, awright. Okay..." He gave it a good long look, halting the scrolling by smacking the interface. "Mech, this interface is weird. It's so... _basic._ What, did they make it for people living on rocks in the middle of nowhere?" He scrolled along. "Alrighty, looks like the language we got here isn't one I've seen much of. It looks a lot like Simfurian Colloquial, but seriously weird; maybe generational language drift?"

"Simfur, you said?" Propeller said sharply, look up at the sword again.

"Yeah. Why?"

"I knew I'd seen that kind of glyph before!" He pointed excitedly at the sword looming above them, hopping up and down. "That's _Simfur_ writing!"

"Dude, don't rock the slate! You'll break it or something!"

"Sorry." Propeller stared up. "That sword might be from Simfur, then."

"Bro. One translation job at a time, okay?" Even so, Grindjack glanced upwards, looking at it thoughtfully. "Anyway, that'd be one nasty job. Simfur is a _nightmare_ to translate; even the most simple stuff in it is super-contextual. Everything means something else depending on what else you say or how you pronounce it. Written down, the character of nearby glyphs change the meaning. It's why translators can't handle it and Simfur speakers sound funny; you need special translators to get across what they're saying right."

"Any ideas?"

Grindjack looked at them critically. "I have no idea. Some of them _might_ be Old Simfur Claw-Writ, that'd be about the time when they only just started appointing monarchs to lead them. Dunno if that means that the sword is super-old or not. Okay, that one over there _might_ have something to do with 'flames'. And that one over there is... 'Burning Justice'? I hope that's not the name of the sword, that's just corny."

"No, it's awesome!" Propeller said defensively.

"Dude, you're being super defensive about a sword that isn't even yours."

"Not yet it's not." Grindjack shrugged. "I didn't really pay much attention to really old languages. I'd just be guessing past this point."

"Guess we could have an expert analyze later, if we gotta. Don't worry, bud."

"Awrighty! Data-slate, then." Grindjack leaned down and peered at it. "Okay, _definitely_ like Simfur Colloquial, at least while it was being spoken on Cybertron; it isn't much like some of the stuff I've heard from Predacons or buffaloid pals. Ooh, I think Scowl talks that!"

Both of them giggled excitedly; Scowl the saurinoid was one of their great heroes, an unstoppable engine of destruction and raw power, whatever his unsavory origins. He was something of a inspiration for young bots; if someone from _his_ background could make it up the meritocracy, anyone could.

"So maybe whoever made this list came from Scowl's homeland. The mercury swamps of Old Simfur on Cybertron," Grindjack supposed. "And... ooh, I think I got it now. Okay, it looks like a bunch of names, guess. A list, maybe."

"Some of them are dimmed out," Propeller said. "Covered up with red text."

"I think it means those guys were already caught. Or dead." Grindjack stared at one of the names, near the very top of the list, presumably at the 'capture or kill' priority. It was still an active hunt, apparently. "This guy is called... Overlord. Huh, it can't be. You don't think it's _the_ Overlord, do you?"

Propeller perked up. "The famous general? I think he's always sent far out to the most troublesome alien colonies to pacify them or pave the way for Decepticon inhabitation." He frowned. For some reason there was not a great deal of actual _information,_ per se, on what Overlord did exactly on the planets he was permitted to fight. "Why would someone be gunning for him?"

"Enemies of the state, probably! Maybe there's a clue in the language here. I mean, it looks a little bit like..." He sobered. "Oh. You're not gonna like this."

"Why not?"

"It's _Autobot_ language."

"...What?" Propeller said, in a very quiet and small voice.

"Common Cant, I hear them call it." Grindjack said something in whistling, chirping noises that did not sound right. "That's what it sounds like, I think."

"Then... we have an Autobot ship," Propeller said, swelling up with a mixture of patriotic determination and the innate fear any young Decepticon would feel at the thought of those terrors. "With Autobot bounty hunters, or killers!" The education feeds and tales had impressed this upon him; the Autobots would not rest until every and all Decepticons were wiped away from the universe, no matter how small or frail or weak. From their chaotic hearts was the desire to destroy all culture, all civilization, every scrap of unity and peace that had ever developed. To cast aside the separation of species and force them together no matter what might result, just to see what happened.

From the mad sparks of the Autobots would all safety and merit come crashing down. The Empire would be cast down and all traces of it wiped out, if the Autobots had their way. They had done the same to Cybertron.

(Needless to say, Decepticon history is _extraordinarily_ biased.)

Grindjack curled up into a little ball. "This is bad, mech! This is really, _really bad!_ "

"What do we do?" Propeller whispered. "Do we just run? Report it before it's too late? What if the Autobots are already up? What if they're _right behind us right now?!_ "

"I don't know! Oh Primus we're gonna die."

Propeller hesitated. "...We could get as much stuff as we could. If we just run, we'll lose out on the salvage. And the awesome sword."

Grindjack uncurled slightly to stare incredulously at him. "You serious? You still want an _Autobot_ sword?!"

"I don't care where it's from or if those anar-whatever bullies got it first!" Propeller insisted. "It's too awesome not to keep! I'll rescue it from them, just watch me!" He hesitated. "...Even if they're still alive. And like, _super-_ big."

Grindjack considered. "If they're still alive and we run into them... if they're still here and not dead... what'll we do? They could kill us easy!"

Propeller stood up straight, even though he very much agreed with the 'no no no THIS IS A BAD IDEA' notion. "Then we gotta fight, anyway. Just imagine what Lord Megatron would say to us when he passes and metes judgment upon us at the end of existence, if we ran away right now without even fighting?"

"That we're not suicidally dense?"

"No! He'd be ashamed of us!" Propeller pointed dramatically. "You really want to pass into the Allspark with that shame hanging on you, forever... or would you rather pass into the Allspark _trying_ to fight a fight you have absolutely no chance of winning?!"

"...Is this a trick question?"

"Yes," Propeller said. "Okay, but maybe not the way you might assume. We gotta fight, even if we die."

"But who'll take care of _her?_ " Grindjack pleaded. "And I don't wanna die without ever having fallen in love!"

Propeller hesitated. Bringing up Screamqueen like this was a punch to the Spark. "...I think she'd be disappointed if we missed out on a chance like this to be heroes."

Grindjack frowned. "You sure? She's never been too interested in the spread of progress and the burden of Decepticon stuff."

"But she gets honor! This is an honor thing. We gotta do it." Propeller set his faceplates firmly.

Grindjack bowed his head. "Well... uh... if you're so set on going out there..." he extended a paw hopefully. "I'm going with you. Bros to the end."

Propeller tapped his fist, specifically a part that become a section of his turret gun, against Grindjack's. "To the end." Far off, along a distant corridor, there was a faintly rumbling and they both jolted. "Okay, that was probably a sign for us to do something!"

"Like what?"

"Find whatever it was and punch it in the fact!" Propeller said.

"...Seems legit." The two of them went to the edge of the locker and Grindjack extended himself into a bridge, clamping to the locker and stretching out into a long and wide lane, anchoring himself on the ground below. Propeller vaulted over him and transformed into turret mode, rolling down the considerable height downward and safely driving to the ground, spinning a few times as he lost control in transition. He got back into position, pointing himself at an open elevator, the only place to go from here. He looked almost like a toy, in that vast and alien place. He immediately rolled along.

"Should we take the sword?" Grindjack suggested, still a bridge.

"No time!" Propeller tight-beamed. "You'll need to get super big to carry it and we should probably try being sneaky until it's too late."

"Okay!" Grindjack snapped himself free, rolling into a ball and adopting a gyrosphere vehicle mode again, quickly rotating up speed and quickly catching up with Propeller, the two of them zooming into the open elevator.

Their progress was somewhat inconvenienced by the lack of anything to land on; if there was an elevator there at all, it was somewhere else. Both of them crashed into the ground. "Ow," Propeller said, looking up. Distantly above them, in this elevator space a good chunk of their house could have fit into with room to spare, there was more light coming out of an opening. "I think I see an open elevator up there." Another rumbling, louder than before, came from up there. "Yep, they're probably up there. The bad guys, I mean."

"I'm on it!" Grindjack lassoed his arms around Propeller's main section several times until he was secured, and grew a set of jets from his back (and other places on his body, to ensure lift and maintain direction) and ignited, the two of them rocketing to the door.

Unfortunately Grindjack overdid it, flying straight up into the top of that door and losing cohesion of his body, flattening into a disc and crashing into the floor. He didn't even have time to groan before Propeller smashed into him, splattering yellow liquid metal everywhere. Propeller flopped over with bits of Grindjack flowing off him, the various bits of the Mutacon regaining solidity and turning into tiny robots resembling Arachnibots (a sub-species of Transformer whose robot modes closely resembled the spiders and related beings of many worlds, more rare on Cybertron than they had been on colony worlds like the Autobot world of Eukaris or Jungletron; most infamous of these spider-bots was the dread Airachnid, long since vanished into the Terrorcon ranks ages ago and into nightmare). The tiny spider-robots banged into each other, fitting their legs together like tiny armatures and building themselves back into the shape of a beastformer, merging and reforming back into Grindjack.

In the meantime, Propeller had already transformed back into his robot mode, since that was quicker than wheeling up; the whole reforming process had been pretty quick but he was already on his feet and looking around, and he tight-beamed to Grindjack that they were in a corridor; possibly a main access hall if their lessons in ship architecture could be relied on. Though if this was an Autobot ship after all, they might not follow the sensibilities of Decepticon shipbuilding.

Propeller took a cautious step forward and his foot nearly sank into a depression big enough to fit his fist through. The floor here was also built into a reinforced mesh pattern, for absorbing shocks. And again he looked up at the high ceiling, and the wide walls, and again he though that even Screamqueen could fit in here without difficulty.

The idea of fighting someone – maybe even _multiple_ people – as big and powerful as Screamqueen was not a fun idea. He punched his fists together, trying to pump himself up again, and he imagined himself hitting them in the knees, maybe that would work. Slow them down, exploit their weaknesses, rely on the fact that it was hard to catch or smash things much smaller than you.

It didn't help that much. He shook himself and glanced around; the corridor seemed built into a horseshoe, looping around a central chamber he couldn't see too well (perhaps it was the bridge or war room) on the inside, on the outside it had many doors in a somewhat chaotic arrangement. Propeller was looking at one of them now, sealed shut and nearly as high as the ceiling, it's exterior heavily scarred and patched over in many places. It didn't have a security pad or cybermetric analyzer anywhere, so perhaps this ship was not high on security.

A stealth ship, perhaps. One with a lot of extremely powerful weapons in the room below; Propeller tight-beamed to Grindjack his musings, suggesting that maybe they'd entered into a cargo bay where the crew loaded up their equipment before setting out on a mission. It'd be quicker than detouring to a different room where they kept that stuff, and more essential if they had to depart the ship in a hurry. Grindjack agreed (while rotating his head to make sure it was screwed on right and his ears weren't inside-out again), that made sense.

"A stealth ship with lots of powerful equipment in it, but not a very big one?" Grindjack tight-beamed. "Sounds like it'd have commandos. A small strike team, I'd guess."

"You think this is _small_?" Propeller replied, his optical displays lighting up with multiple exclamations.

"Considering the size of the people it was probably built for, yeah! It's all relative, bud. Might be huge for you, or me right now, but I figure whoever uses this ship, they're big enough that they gotta have doors that size. The proportions of everything, it's not right for something around even me right now. They gotta be bigger for that to work right."

"What if you're wrong and they got this ship somewhere else?" Propeller suggested.

"Then we're super-lucky and caught a break!"

The lights were flickering; not on and off, but dimming and brightening in a steady not-quite-pattern. Propeller went to the nearest light and studied it intently. He'd picked up enough from the basic engineering courses all military-ready Decepticons were sent through (to at least maintain their own gear) for him to decide that the power of this ship was perfectly intact, but it'd taken a bit of a beating from the crash landing. He was wondering what the circumstances of that were; he supposed he'd have seen _some_ evidence of a fight from the outside, like open holes from a missile blast or laser burns, but the ship was perfectly fine. And no bodies or signs of battle inside, whether from the crew having a falling out or invaders. It might even be something as simple as the pilot being really lousy at their job.

The light flickered brighter and brighter, finally steadying onto something regular. The dark corridor was illuminated more brightly, and Grindjack tight-beamed an approving comment of how messy it was; he didn't like too much cleanliness, considering it a sign of a deformity of the Spark. (And also sure sign of possession by Unicron. Grindjack was weird like that.) Boxes were strewn everywhere, chemical containers rolling about with their contents intact, ammunition crates laying on their sides, grenade belts hanging on the walls like decorations, actual decorations.

Propeller took a closer look at these, hoping they might tell him something about the crew in advance. Little plastic toys, hanging off shelves like the raided contents of a space port's cheap and useless junk depot, somewhat more expensive plastic toys that had been constructed by die-cast (a regretfully lost art, Lord Megatron had once stated in a famous broadcast extorting manufacturers not to forget the classic methods) of the same kinds of Quintesson-aired shows that Propeller himself loved, giving him a bit of a shock. There were also... trophies, he supposed, taken from the bodies of slain foes and terrible monsters. That was a Simfur tradition (along other places, like Kaon's outlaying areas and Tarn), certainly. It was also something Propeller himself liked to do, and he admired the Vilgaxian tentacles dipped in resin and preserved, the mummified skulls of many weirdly oblong insectoid skulls with secondary jaws, dead Scraplets arranged on a wall like an insect collection, and here there were more heads.

Genuine severed heads. Propeller followed them, outlined on the walls, and he walked by several doors opening as the power leveled itself out. The trophy heads were preserved in various ways, whether mechanical or organic or something else, and mounted with little plagues below them. "Hey, buddy?"

"What's up?" Grindjack said, frowning in faint distaste at the grisly trophies. Some of the more robotic ones were bothering him faintly. Some of them looked a bit familiar.

"I want to take a closer look at these trophies. Give me a lift up."

"Alrighty, hold on a sec. This is creepin' me out, though!"

"It'll just be a bit!"

Grindjack lifted Propeller onto his shoulders, seating him on a flat section behind the forward projection of his neck. He then flew into the air, transforming into a small jet-like vehicle mode, lift-generating pods sprouting at ideal places, his whole body compressing a bit and spreading out into flattened wings. Set into these were vertical take-off fans, shielded so nothing could get sucked into them, and these whirred on, lifting them both into the air and nearly to the ceiling, leveling out in front of the nearest trophy.

Propeller peered with interest at the head there; a broad and rather nasty skull dipped in preservative plastics to keep it intact (it might have been taken a very long time ago), the teeth long since fallen out of the skull but replaced with heavy and sharp ones that Propeller hoped were a match for the real teeth. Even if this was just an organic monster, it would have been disrespectful.

"These guys definitely got around, whoever they are," Grindjack observed, extending optical sensors off his side to note the next trophy down. While the skull Propeller had examined was originally from an organic and about as big as his torso, this next trophy was bigger than his whole body, much bigger than even Grindjack's default robot mode. Long, draconian and fearsomely toothy, it seemed to glare at them even with empty eyesockets, owing to the shape of the heavy brow ridges and hornlets. "That thing there is a... let's see, a Makluan. Shapeshifting alien dragon monsters."

"How do you know that?"

"I read the plaque, duh. There's something else below it, but it's kind of hard to understand; looks Simfurian. It might be 'Strafe' but I don't think that's the actual name. Could be the name of whoever killed it."

"Oh." Propeller pointed at the first skull he'd been looking at. "What about that one?"

"'Ravenous Bug-Blatter Beast of Traal'," Grindjack said promptly. "And below it, the name of whoever killed it... hard to understand. It might be 'Trapjaw'... nah, that's not right. 'Tyrannobot', maybe? No, I can't read it."

"Bug-blatter beast? Ooh, I've always wanted to wrestle one of those," Propeller said. "You know, I'm sort of starting to like these guys. They got good taste in trophies, at least. It's like an honor thing, respecting slain enemies by displaying them with pride!"

"You're weird. Maybe if we take them prisoner you guys can talk about how weird you both are, eh?"

"You just have no taste." Propeller urged him onward and they traveled to more trophies; now they saw ones from mechanical lifeforms. They passed the massive glassy eye of a feral driller (a massive mechanical worm bred on Cybertron as a digging machine and living factory, extruding products from its body and using the things it ate as raw material), the fuchsia-tinted horns of an Alternian troll (not its empress, who in this iteration of her people was easily large enough to match even a Transformer in size and power, but perhaps this had been a governor of some colony) and a single tire. That was it, just a tire.

Grindjack found that interesting. "Says it's from winning a race somewhere. On foot, I think. Everyone else was in speeders and cycles! I guess they took the tire from the former champion's vehicle."

"'Vehicle'?" Propeller said with some distaste. "Ugh. Had to be on a non-Decepticon world. That sounds so... un-classy. Or an organic planet! That's just kind of weird." The next trophy was the preserved head of some variety of organic neither of them quite recognized. "Any idea who this is?"

"Some kind of tyrant from a world that I guess work with the Autobots now," Grindjack said. He looked along the corridor. "Huh. A _lot_ of the heads there look like they used to be on a list of bad guys." He hesitated. "Killing _people_ and taking their heads as trophies? Even to organics, that's kind of..."

"I dunno," Propeller said cheerfully. "Respect for a slain foe! Or maybe pride you made the universe better by taking them out of it."

"You really gotta talk to somewhat about that. You're scary."

"Am not, I-" Propeller stopped. He saw the next head.

It was the mounted head of a Decepticon.


	3. Trophies

This chapter took longer than expected, and because it went on for a bit, I opted to split them up; I'll be posting the next chapter in a couple days, as it's basically done!

Disclaimer: I do not own Transformers, Steven Universe, or any other copyrighted series appearing in this fic. This is a work of entertainment without monetary gain.

* * *

Two Decepticon soldiers, neither of them exactly experienced or advanced up the local meritocracy in any significant way but still looking forward to fine careers in conquest, were on quasi-active duty in a well-off city somewhere near the outreaches of the more rural areas a short while before they got the call.

Quasi-active duty was a peculiar notion but a common one in even the more divergent of Decepticon planetary practices (which could differ more significantly from planet to planet especially in outer colonies, a practice that some complained about as lacking strength or making it harder to maintain cohesion among soldiers of different homeworlds but did ensure a lot of doctrinal flexibility that made those same soldiers unpredictable to their enemies). Soldiers not assigned to direct action were set to... not patrol, _exactly,_ but tend to a list of different tasks, ranked in order of urgency and difficulty. These tasks could entail a wide variety of different jobs: it might involve making high-profile deliveries to VIPs, it might involve assisting in an legal investigation or execute a troublesome criminal, it could deal with assisting in off-world mining interests, and so on: virtually any job even loosely connected with military purposes (or serving them, as in the case of earning them favors or good PR) might be carried out with soldiers.

In the case of these two Decepticons, who were called Jetstorm and Terrorsaur, this job involved pacifying the state of resentful unrest in the ghettos where organics, shamed Decepticons, robots of types or species deemed untrustworthy and second-class citizens of all models were mostly forced to settle. In other societies, such matters wouldn't be much worse than a harmless gripe session, but Air Commander Starscream had, even in the infancy of their movement, determined that such agents of potential disorder had to be harshly punished at the first sign of chafing at Decepticon rule, lest they rise up or slay any decent robots.

This state of circumstances wasn't always so grim as that. Most such citizens lived fairly well enough or peacefully. That said, any sign of unrest whatsoever would be harshly punished, to prevent such an uprising situation. In competent hands, this should have led to finding ways to get those people to feel greater loyalty to the Decepticon cause, but owing to general hostility and the superiority endemic to Decepticon political thought, this typically wound up involve shake-downs, calling in nasty favors, or intimidating people into compliance. Usually when smarter commanders were involved, diplomatic soldiers were assigned to this, since it was counterproductive to send a bully and thug to solve this sort of thing. In this case, whoever had assigned these two had totally dropped the ball.

It might have just been disdain for the people who had to live in places like this. Decepticon territory, though permitting non-Decepticons to live there, did not often treat them well.

Normally this sort of thing would be up for the local law enforcement to deal out. In Decepticon territory, while there were legal departments to sort out technicalities and resolve matters, there wasn't a whole lot of distinction between 'law enforcement' and 'military personnel', just as the average Decepticon didn't easily grasp the difference between a military combatant and a civilian who couldn't or wouldn't fight.

The people who lived here often dreaded the sight of soldiers walking around like they didn't have anything better to do. It usually meant someone was going to be unhappy.

"...And then she head-butted me, right in the chassis!" said Jetstorm, a recent graduate of a high-class school available to only the most skilled and promising students, and only a tiny fraction of those were selected to attend. Graduating with honors for his scores and combat ability (if not his strategizing, or social skills; stories about his destructive pranks on faculty and peers alike were legendary, as were his constant altercations with rivals and professors), he had declined the entry-level officer posting he had been offered in order to take a lower position, periodically transferring to different colonies and younger worlds at the edge of the empire. What Jetstorm lacked in personal charm, he made up for in political acumen; he wanted to get experience on the battlefield and in learning the ropes of climbing up the meritocracy and knowing who to work with, who was a danger or who was expendable. He didn't want to just advance, he wanted to reach the very highest tiers.

A fairly large Decepticon, Jetstorm had been born of a respected line of Seekers: bipedal, he walked upon legs with multiple knees like a beast of some kind, his feet broad and adapted to flat surfaces and landing, not running. His arms were broader and larger than usual for Seekers, his hands around the level of his highest knees and allowing him to run quadrupedal with ease. His head, long and elongated like a helm, was crowned by a visor of sorts that made up most of his forehead with a frontal-mounted optical sensor. If he had eyes behind that visor, or if that visor _was_ his eyes, only his medics knew for sure. His kibble was arranged so that his body had a very angular design; like a set of broad triangles all connected together.

"Sounds like a keeper," Terrorsaur said in a voice that was deep enough, growling enough that it should have been scary no matter how he spoke. Something in his basic character seeped through, though, and he was incapable of sounding scary no matter how he tried, he just sounded snide or sarcastic, depending on how irritable or cheerful he was feeling. He was being sincere in this case: a beastformer who had arisen from the constructed wellspark of an asteroid belt with the alternate mode of a flying saurinoid, he was a political schemer and ambitious mech whose career was continually derailed by his own obnoxious demeanor and an inability to really make decent gambits without exposing himself as a schemer.

He was also a complete and blatant fanboy of Air Commander Starscream. This wasn't necessarily a _bad_ thing, assuming you didn't know Starscream's many personality failings, but it was somewhat off-putting in the independently minded Decepticons; idolizing was seen as something for Autobots and... other people who idolized, they guessed. Decepticons rarely had opportunities for cross-cultural comparisons. Terrorsaur's fascination with Starscream was clear in his frame, modeled to resemble his idol: his robot mode was tall and relatively slender, the sharp-looking kibble of his pterosaur mode similar to the long and sloping figure of Starscream. His limbs were longer than usual, enough that he could move on all fours, and with his elongated proportions it made him look somewhat gangly, but possessed of a deadly grace that made him look rather unnerving for all of his silly posturing. And he was more broad-shouldered, the head of his beast mode folding into the sections of his torso along with his wings.

Jetstorm glanced at Starscream, part of his visor folding in a way that looked like a raised eyebrow. "Is that a hint of jealousy and resentment I smell?" he said coyly. "Do speak up!"

"What, no," Terrorsaur said, his perpetual sneer fading into genuine surprise. For a beastformer (who tended towards morphological divergence, even by Transformer standards), his face was extremely close to the 'two eyes, one mouth, flat face and crest' pattern the Functionalist cult had surgically enforced in Cybertron's high societies. If you didn't notice the predator kibble and Predacon-style angles of his body, it was hard to guess at his alt mode at all. "I was being serious!"

"Oh, really? Very hard to tell with you, sometimes. You're a hard bot to read."

"Wish I could do it on command," Terrorsaur complained. "Then I wouldn't keep getting reassigned to backwater Energon farms like this cesspit of a planet! Ugh, all the times I've insulted superiors at the wrong moment... take it from me, you want to know how to not broadcast how much of an idiot everyone around you is. Jets like you get all the luck."

"Well, you know real worth when you see the frame it was minted in," Jetstorm said smugly, buffing his claws on his chestplate. There was a nasty screeching noise. "Oh, Primus delete it, I just polished there, I've only gone and ruined the finish! Oh, why do I keep doing that?!"

"Clearly your processor was not _minted_ in the best condition," Terrorsaur replied, cackling unpleasantly. Even his laughs sounded like a screech.

"I hate you and everything you stand for," Jetstorm said, but cordially. Amiable hostility was how Decepticons from his part of the empire showed affection: it wasn't exactly a custom, but it showed that you respected someone enough to say challenging things like that and being confident that they wouldn't be offended enough to attack you over it.

(This says something about the Decepticons. Even their friendships were rife with aggressive politics and double-thinking, delicate balances of mutually contradicting forces that could make the whole system topple over into violence, kept contained by a firm sense of loyalty to the cause and warrior brotherhood.)

"How? We stand for the same things!" Terrorsaur thought about it, tapping a wickedly curved claw on his mighty chin. "I mean, besides the things we hate. Like assimilationists. Primus, I hate those guys! They're so preachy..."

"You and me both, flaps."

The two of them walked down a ramp, along one of the sides steepled to make broad enough steps for all but the largest non-combiner Transformers. (Those who were too big for the stars could use their alt mode and move down the middle, take a cab, or improvise; Decepticon culture was kind to those who could come up with tricky solutions to immediate problems, and cruel to those who lacked the imagination or quick wit.) Around them, rising out of the edge of a dried Energon mining pit established after the planet was seeded with Energon to aid the cyberforming processes and help the illusion that this planet hadn't been originally inhabited, was the vast spread of urban squalor, cheap and subsidized housing set in geometric patterns to maximize space.

The buildings were all roughly the same, mass-produced modular constructions meant to slot together, and normally they were supposed to be grouped together to make increasingly complex and useful homes. That was too much effort, and these modules were old, outdated and retired models, worn and rusted lumps of a module or two for each house. Little more than bare sleeping space and room for scant household amenities. Mostly, they were clamped together into huge and lumpy complexes, arcing together to make bridges and additional buildings and self-contained levels of a literal inner city; these apartments were cheaper, but even more squalid and small than the housing units.

A few people walked by them; going on foot and taking a wide berth around them (but not so obviously that it attracted attention), moving around in vehicular alt modes if they had any; rare, there were few vehicle robots in this part of the city, Transformer or otherwise. Mostly they were organics; aliens conquered by the Decepticons and directly assimilated into the empire, all but the most Decepticon-like aspects of their cultures ruthlessly stomped out and washed away to produce a culturally homogeneous population. They rarely were much like their ancestors, and now the descendants of proud warriors and defiant homesteaders recoiled from Decepticon soldiers, hiding behind windows or anxiously ducking into alleyways to avoid the gaze of Jetstorm or Terrorsaur.

The two Decepticons paid them little attention; most of the aliens were vastly smaller than them, and to them the organics were literally beneath their attention or effort.

Terrorsaur glanced at the buildings, shuddering as though the aesthetics were mortally painful to him. "I hate these tinytowns. Everything is too... _small._ " True; most of the buildings here had been made to hold cargo, not living people; they were cramped and blocky, ill-suited for residences but very cheap.

"The smell is what bothers me," Jetstorm replied. He sniffled irritably at the perpetual smell of rust and broke down factories or sewage facilities the local governance allowed to run down until they collapsed, out of laziness instead of malice or stupidity. "Ugh. It _stinks_ of meat-things here." A couple of relatively tiny aliens, barely as big as his claws, bristled with offense but ducked away when he glanced idly in their direction.

He probably also scented a powerful aroma of fear, and resentment. It curdled here, rising up from so many people and for so many reasons, getting thicker and boiling from no one having the opportunity to do anything, the governments refused to even listen to them except when other Decepticons argued on their behalf. It rankled them even worse, that they had no voice except when others presumed to know what was best for them and acted like they were too childish and dim to even do that. To speak up was to invite retaliation and get your whole life torn up just out of Decepticon spite. And that just made some people angrier, and start scheming.

The air here didn't just stink from pollution and neglect: the nearly terminal hatefulness was turning _rancid._

Terrorsaur and Jetstorm were oblivious to all this. Or perhaps indifferent. Even if they knew that the people in this part of town would have gladly killed them just to strike at the Decepticons (however futile it was), they wouldn't have taken it seriously. Terrorsaur sneered at a small child staring balefully at him until its mother swooped down on feather-plucked wings to take it away.

But they were just two Decepticons. Two relatively small bots in a _very_ large part of town almost on fire with resentment and no outlet for its fury. Sooner or later, enough would be enough and they'd lash out, only to be struck down. But the Decepticon Empire would bleed, at least for a short time. It had happened before, many times, and it would happen again. Jetstorm and Terrorsaur did not realize this, or ever think about it, or even think about the people who lived here. After all, they didn't consider them 'people' at all, and treated them accordingly.

And on that note, Jetstorm turned off the rampway to one of the smaller houses. Small was a relative term; it was much larger than the organic-scale homes, but still only a single bedroom module with a rounded attic that had apparently been added personally. A small mail receptacle sat out in front of it, knocked off its pedestal with a leering face and speciesist graffiti on it. Terrorsaur stomped on it for good measure and not even looking, like he was doing it on auto-pilot.

Leaning slightly down to fit between the narrow space between the door and the other home bundles lumped around it, Jetstorm knocked imperiously on the door, his claws rapping on an unpainted surface between the letters of a message declaring "SQUIDS GO HOME!" in blocky and shaky shapes.

"Seven for spirit but I'm docking points for style," Jetstorm remarked, talking about the graffiti. "The quints are terrible people but a little subtlety would be classier."

The door opened; it should have creaked but the pressure joints had been oiled and greased so that it moved silently, with a certain weight so that didn't even have to be pushed hard to open up. Jetstorm idly wondered if they could score a bit of entertainment for the day by getting the inhabitant up on a charge of illegal tampering with city property, he didn't actually _mind_ fixing the doors like that but he was very bored. "Now you let me do the talking," he muttered to Terrorsaur. "We're doing this by the routine. I'm the nice reasonable one, you're the mean racist who makes me seem all better by comparison."

"I never get to be the reasonable one," Terrorsaur complained. "You never let me do the talking!"

"One, I have seniority, I get to decide who sounds good! And two, of course I don't, you're _terrible_ at talking to people."

"This coming from the bot with, what, a dozen demerits for dishonorable levels of puns in a combat situation?" Terrorsaur mumbled, but it was a low-anger, spite-free kind of mumble.

The room beyond was dark; eerily so, even creepy. Jetstorm, who had once seen vid-picts of the laboratories of Shockwave on the Decepticon capital, shivered and just knew he would have nightmares about this. It looked so... spooky. A little bit beyond, he thought he could see glimpses of gauzy curtains studded with shiny stones, clumsily made storage cases for archival slates and genuine books (bound together by hand), and a small elegant table laid for multiple people, with dishes set on cozies over an cloth embroidered with some kind of mural.

The dishes, with their weird food, still looked warm. Jetstorm glanced at Terrorsaur, tight-beaming a query: ' _Did we just wander into some kind of freaky poor people meeting?'_ and Terrorsaur nodded grimly. This might be entertaining after all.

Pushing the door open entirely and not _quite_ blocking their view of all that was what _looked_ like a female robot expertly assembled from the contents of a scrapyard. She stared at them levelly, with a dignity that was almost regal.

Bhanibhel she was called, and they weren't honestly sure if it was an assumed name or not. Her form was expertly made, though it had been cobbled together from cast-offs: you could barely see the seams, but there were seams, and oversized parts joined to sections clearly not designed for them. The overall impression was charming in spite of the unpolished and crude form, and she really was quite attractive; deliberately so, designed for that. It struck Jetstorm as a bit narcissistic, really. And it made him a little unnerved; the femme was just a face of what he was really looking at, so to speak.

She didn't look too different from a Transformer that might come to live here. She was just as tall as Jetstorm himself and just as wide in structurally significant locations. Curvy in a fashion that was common among many self-described female organisms across the universe for inexplicable reasons, her frame made of discarded parts machined and fashioned into mechanical body parts. Clearly she was a work in progress; while all her body was the same shade of reddish pink, little of it looked like it belonged on the same body. Currently her cover story was that she was a Junkion seeing the galaxy; while it made sense for her appearance, Jetstorm and Terrorsaur knew what she really was and therefore not to take anything she said at face value.

She looked politely at them, tilting her head slightly to see them at eye level due to the odd proportions of her body; one shoulder was larger than the other and her torso was shaped... wrong. As a consequence, her posture was shaped differently, though still humanoid. Jetstorm wanted to think of what she did next as blinking but this wasn't accurate; she didn't _have_ eyes or sensible optics or a visor; the front portions of her upper face was a screen, ringed by binocular facing small optical sensors like little lights. This screen emoted through blue eye-shapes, crude and cracked so that the display wavered quite a bit.

The eye display... stuttered. The display was breaking down so much that the power to it was going off for a few moments, or she affected blinking by _deliberately_ denying power for a few moments. The eyes flickered on and off, very quickly and it seemed like she was blinking. A learned trait from observation; she would have no reason to do it otherwise.

"Hello?" Bhanibhel said, her voice incredibly mellifluous and pleasant. She at least had a humanoid face, her mouthplates slightly edged and apparently made from redesigned mandibles. "Ah. I know you two. Right?" This was spoken in a slightly more uncertain tone, and her optical display 'blinked' again. A few of her limbs shivered; one main arm, and the two smaller arms at her midsection, bristling with a variety of tools. Jetstorm had seen her about town working on things, and supposed that she made a living doing repairs on tedious jobs too boring and dangerous even for drones. It certainly did a number on her frame. "Is this a social call?"

"Not really, no," Terrorsaur said offhandedly. He paused, evidently remembering Jetstorm's orders about opening his beaky mouth in the presence of people. "Except yes. Only in a way that's no social. So. Awk. Yeah."

She squinted at him. At least, her eye designs narrowed into little angles. It looked like a cutesy depiction of someone narrowing their eyes really tightly or shutting them. "Did you just squawk?"

"Yes!" Terrorsaur hunched his shoulders defensively, sections of his bodies starting to fold out. Specifically it was his wing kibble.

Jetstorm knew the signs of Terrorsaur losing his temper and about to shift into his more combat-suitable beast mode. "Settle down," he said lazily. Terrorsaur complied, skulking back and his body settling back entirely into robot mode, and he was still glaring at the femme.

Bhanibhel didn't appear to respond. Jetstorm was mildly offended at her stoicism, though he smiled nastily at the less relaxed tension in her mode. Her legs in particular were going very stuff; she had two of them, thick and round and no doubt very stable and strong, but they branched off at the knee into multiple smaller legs with multiple joints like fractal designs, or root systems. An artsy thing, he supposed. Now all these legs bent down, making her stance more stable and incidentally lowering herself a bit, looking shorter. Shorter, in fact, than Jetstorm.

He preened, overlooking that she might well have been _taller_ than him if she stood up to her full height, though she likely couldn't maintain it for long. "You're late on your payments," Jetstorm said sweetly.

She stiffened, as if to argue. He stared at her, his claws flexing. Terrorsaur relaxed, grinning wide enough to show his pointed teeth. She stared at them, taking in them both with a wide stare, and her optical display became small, sad lines.

Time to push it a bit, Jetstorm thought. He moved his arm wide, with a flourish, indicating a part of the wall that looked wrong; made of the wrong materials, and bolted on with glues to keep it steady. It looked like there had been a big hole there, patched up inadequately at great expense. "Just paying up is easier than doing repairs," he said, trying to talk like a fancy salesman or something. To make a point, he poked her in the shoulder, hard.

His claws scratched, with a loud and painful noise, against deep and jagged scars in the metal of her shoulder. A wound that she'd _remember,_ that would tingle and itch whenever she got too warm or cold, the living metal of her body aching there. Not easy to repair, even if she had the money for the expensive procedures for it. And the wicked slashes of the scars, deep enough that her muscular systems were compromised, were a perfect match for his own claws.

Jetstorm scratched at them, grinning at how she flinched away and tried not to look at him.

Terrorsaur stood against the wall, arms crossed and he chimed in, "Repairs cost _money._ Just think about it. You're smart. You know..." he nodded at Jetstorm.

Jetstorm grinned. "For a _squid,_ " he said, and the femme flinched like she had been struck across the mouthplates.

"Is that kind of language really necessary?" Bhanibhel said, sounding tired and too inured to it to really be hurt.

Jetstorm frowned, and almost smacked her across the room for her insolence: he forced himself to remember that just _talking_ to him like he was an equal wasn't really insolence; she was a foreigner, she wasn't a Transformer, she was quite nearly organic (depending on how you looked at it) despite her exterior... you couldn't expect her to understand how real people thought. With what he considered to be great grace, he said, "What's necessary is that you learn your slagging _place,_ quint."

"All right!" she said, nervously looking outside to see if anyone had heard. "Just... please, don't spread it around. I'll pay up, just... oh, please give me a moment..."

"So long as you don't annoy anyone," Terrorsaur said casually, putting a hand on Jetstorm's shoulder plates. Jetstorm straightened up, calming down.

She hurried away for a moment, disappearing into a side room. Jetstorm watched her go and said nothing for a long while; he indicated an audio sensor at the side of his head, nodded at Terrorsaur, and listened in.

He waited. He smiled, after a moment. It was a pretty nasty and unpleasant smile.

And he also received a message from global surveillance. Usual protocol was to drop immediate non-military concerns and check messages, instantly. Jetstorm ignored it, justifying this as a military matter of keeping stability in the area by reminding rebellious aliens of their place in the world and taking a bit of payback for quintesson oppression of the Transformer people, but Terrorsaur didn't.

"Sir," Terrorsaur said, frowning grimly. "We've got orders."

Jetstorm looked up at him, surprised. "We do?" He tilted his head, trying to listen into what he was _sure_ was several other people moving in another room; shifting nervously, hiding out from them, perhaps illegal immigrants or criminals of some other stripe who really wouldn't want to meet soldiers like them. The quint could get seriously punished for this, oh yes; a little bit of money to pay them off would do nicely, and reminding people that it could be so much worse if they didn't toe the line, that made some fine impressions in the community.

"There's been a crash in a rural region, and we're the closest fliers in range," Terrorsaur reported. "Gist is, the thingy seems a lot like a spaceship and it came from Gem space. But it _might_ be Autobot."

Jetstorm frowned. "...Huh. Understood." He broadcasted to the relays around them, "Orders received. Carrying out now. Jetstorm, out." He shifted into a slightly different stance, and mindset; this had been fun, but now was the time for proper work.

And now came the quint, scuttling back to them like a pink and robotic insect, just enough like a Transformer to be creepy. She held a credit slab and extended it to them. "Your money, here."

Terrorsaur took it. "Thank you for your service to the Decepticon Empire," he said snidely. He was probably sincere, though. She turned away, clearly repressing the urge to say something sarcastic but would likely invite violence; Decepticon soldiers were not known for their good grace in social work.

Jetstorm contemplated the wisdom of leaving her another mark or two to rub the lesson in, and decided that they didn't have time for it and it felt a bit like overkill. He couldn't resist one last jibe, and said, "We'll be in touch. See you _later._ "

The two soldiers left, already assuming their alternate modes and blasting off in such a way that it tore the door off the quint's home. "I'll keep that in mind," Bhanibhel muttered to herself.

* * *

Back on the downed ship, Propeller and Grindjack were staring at the heads mounted on the walls, Grindjack still in the form of a flying vehicle but the horror of the situation causing him to lose control and focus.

They felt the horror of being on an Autobot ship once again. This was like something from a fear show, a story they told to scare or instruct sparklings. This was wrong, this was evil, this was... something they didn't have words for.

Not just trophy heads, from slain organics or monsters. These were the heads of _people._ Decepticon heads. Mounted on the walls.

 _Like animals._

Both minicon and mutacon alike shivered; Propeller's kibble rotated in place so that he twisted gently, and Grindjack's form wobbled threateningly, cohesion oozing away. Both of them stared at the face on the wall, slowly drifting away from it. "Sweet hands of Solus," Grindjack whispered, so quietly Propeller barely heard it. They dipped as he lowered, losing control of his shape and flight abilities. "Oh, oh _Primus._ "

Propeller shook himself, and gently smacked his brother on the top of his hood. "No, no. Think! Get closer!"

Grindjack dipped and hovered at the same time, fans spinning up and leveling out. "What? Are you crazy?!"

"I said, get closer, please! We can... no, we should find out who that used to be."

"Why?" Grindjack twisted unhappily. "I don't want to look at that, mech, that is nasty!"

" _Respect._ We need to find out who that was. And... I dunno." Propeller felt uncertain. "Recycle them when we can, I guess."

Grindjack mulled this over. "...Okay," He said reluctantly, rising up again and approaching the head.

It was certainly a Decepticon; the trophy head seemed fairly old, though how old they weren't sure. It could have been older than this ship, taken from a dead bot ages ago and carried around all this time, but the idea was a little sickening. If it really was that old, the Autobots on the ship would have been old soldiers indeed, and Propeller knew his military history pretty well: any Autobot that old would be a frightening warrior indeed, and a whole crew would be rather beyond their abilities. It didn't make much difference to his decision to fight, but it did change the situation.

Propeller didn't recognize the face, who it originally belonged to. In the haze of bewilderment and disgust, a new feeling arose: relief. It made him feel a little sick that he shouldn't feel anything besides revulsion at what he was looking at, but there it was. He was relieved that he wasn't looking at anyone he knew right now; a figure from live feeds, or people he knew that he'd lost contact with, even training-friends who had gone into service before him and disappeared (though Decepticon training made this inevitable, new 'Cons would go into the battlefield and active deployment far from the worlds of their birth, and they might never see anyone they knew for ages to come; when reunions rolled around, they were rarely the same).

It would have been unlikely that he knew the old bot at at all. This mech was- had _been_ old. Old when he tied, and killed a very long time ago. It was hard to tell the original color; he wasn't looking at genuine cybermatter exterior, it had been dipped and treated in various other materials; plasticine resins, treatments of transparent crystals, and other things that would prevent the usual decay of cybermatter that had not been infused with live energon long enough. Normally lack of energon would cause a transformer to gradually diminish, like the rot organics were accursed with; postmortem energon loss made frames and mechanical systems decay far more quickly. Displayed or preserved corpses required some trickery, and Propeller distantly decided that something like this had happened.

These particular methods, while diverse and originating from all over Cybertron, had their roots in the Simfur region. Parts of Simfur had been arid near the boundaries of their land, and incredibly moist in the vast swamps and metallic marshlands that made up much of Simfur. Mechanimals consumed for their energon and cybermatter mass had been preserved for longer periods of time – like the great nomadic tribes who had walked with the herds as the seasons passed, following what was most bountiful and battling the weather as they went – and those same methods had extended to preserving dead cybermatter from the effects of Simfur's hostile elements: rusting through, hollowing out or soaking up so much that they eventually broke apart into particles. This head hadn't been treated in _exactly_ those same ways, but something similar had been done to it.

"I guess whoever did this really was from Simfur," Propeller said. "Maybe descended from somewhere there."

"Probably not," Grindjack said uneasily, staying in the now and trying not to get sick. "I mean... uh..." he trembled, doing his best not to look at the grisly sight in front of them. He tilted his present optical sensors from it. "Considering that list we found in the locker, the sword, and the writing on these trophies, whoever killed this poor bot probably was someone from Simfur."

"I'm not sure if I like that," Propeller replied. "I mean. Scowl the destroyer is from Simfur. It's weird. Thinking of a monster as coming from the same place as a hero like him?"

"Good guys and bad guys can come out of the same places. I mean, places like Iacon and Simfur were the birthplace of the Autobots, but plenty of good Decepticons came from there too!"

"Yeah. I guess so." Propeller took another, closer look at the head. Though it turned his energon pump to do it.

It was nice to see that the Decepticon insignia was still upon a raised section of the brow. He wasn't sure if it was a mark of respect, however muted. It was still shiny and well-buffed, but it was only a little upwind from the horrific wounds that had killed the 'Con; most of the head itself was entirely missing, massive wounds shearing right through. The trophy had been cleaned, the wounds not pared down so much as simply trimmed just enough to keep it intact without making the wound seem less impressive. Most of the skull on that side was gone; the claw marks, bigger around than Propeller's whole body (and frighteningly like Screamqueen's own claws) had... he didn't want to think about it, but it looked like some monster had ripped this bot's head open, crushed the processor and twisted around the insides. The whole face, while recognizable, was still stretched and warped from the resulting structural damage.

It also gave him a clue. The killer had been something _strong,_ and with very large and sharp claws. Perhaps a beastformer using an alt mode with such features. A beast-class was also possible, and in fact somewhat more likely; feral robot modes tended to be more battle ready than beast modes did, it was a curiosity of Transformer physiology he'd never bothered finding out. "I bet whoever did that was really big," he said. "Look at the angle; they must have just reached down and dug in and... you know." He made a nasty, wet noise.

Grindjack didn't have a mouth, or face for that matter, in his present form, so he couldn't make a grossed out expression. Several sensory arrays on his top made offended buzzing noises instead. "Dude, that is nasty, don't make sounds like that! And, uh, don't jump to conclusions until we see the bad guys here. Okay? They could have been flying, or jumped up at an angle."

"But if they're huge, could be that's how the ship is so big," Propeller said eagerly.

"Assuming the ship was made specifically for them, mech! They mighta stolen this one and brought their own trophies along. Okay, so maybe who has it now might not actually be the guys who took the trophies, but considering all the Simfur-writing in the lockers and on these trophies, that's pretty unlikely." Grindjack rambled on like this and forced himself to focus, even though it reminded him of unpleasant stuff. "Just... don't expect specific stuff and get wrong. That's, I dunno, unscientific and stuff."

"Okay, okay." Propeller looked at it more closely, trying to avoid the empty cavity and broken casing. There really was nothing there; either the processor had been completely torn out, or so damaged in the fight that even preservation had not been able to halt the decay of the more delicate sub-systems for long. The exterior frames were more resilient to dissolution than the internals were; a preserved corpse could be almost completely hollow inside without showing much outside decay, if it was done right.

The head itself, in spite of all this, was quite recognizable. This probably wasn't a coincidence; the care taken to keep the head intact all these ages suggested that the killers had _wanted_ the head to be recognizable for all eternity. Propeller imagined doing something like that, and seeing the head of an enemy every so often and getting a lovely, satisfied thrill now and then.

He wondered who the head had been, that the killers might have taken such vindictive joy in his death.

After some thought, he pegged the Decepticon as having been a mech; the squarish and angular shapes of the head were a suggestion but plenty of femmes had masculine body types and head shapes, as did neuter-gender. However, facial growths were almost exclusive to mechs, and this bot had quite an impressive beard before he'd died; postmortem, it had fused into a single mass, only the bits closest to the head showing signs of corded growth from the faceplates. The mouthplates hung slightly open, not so much pained as embarrassed or surprised. It might not have been a final expression; the jaw hydraulics didn't seem very intact on the busted-up side. Similarly, only one of the paired optics was unbroken, and above this was a great horn, slightly curved like an elegant diadem.

The plaque below it was in the same language that Propeller couldn't read; it was probably by the same bots who had taken the other trophies, he guessed. There wasn't any significant differences, which he found offensive. Dead Decepticon corpses being treated the same as dead animals he found offensive; dead _organics,_ on the other hand...

He did his best not to follow the thought all the way through. It made him feel uncomfortable. "What's the plaque say?" He asked, trying not to think about this too much.

Grindjack lowered himself, happy to get away from the head. "Well, Simfurian is hard to reach. Super-contextual, like I said. So I'm not sure but based on the way the name all fits together, it was _probably_ a mech when... he, I guess, was alive?"

"I knew it!"

"And the bot himself," Grindjack continued. "I think his name was... let's see. Dominus Trannis."

Propeller blinked. "What, really?"

"Yep." Grindjack tilted a section of his sensory arrays up inquisitively. "You're looking kinda freaked out. More than before, I mean. You know who that is? I don't!"

"You did say Trannis, right?" Propeller repeated. He stared at the great head (easily bigger than the whole of his body), and the remnants of metal beard. "I... yeah. I've heard of him."

"You have?" Grindjack's voice sounded a bit concerned. "Oh mech, I'm sorry. I, I didn't mean... he was someone you _knew_? Oh Primus, I can't-"

"No, no, it's okay, bud!" Propeller patted Grindjack's shell. "I never knew him. He died _way_ before either of us was ever forged. Before this planet was inhabited... I think. He died when the homeworld was still inhabitable! Don't feel bad about it."

"Oh, okay. Whew! Uh, not that I'm glad he's dead. Just that you didn't know him. Wait, that makes me sound like a sociopath..."

Propeller giggled. "Nah, just kind of a goofball."

"Welp, the mechs and the femmes, they like goofballs." Grindjack returned to the trophy. "So who was he? I've never heard of anyone like that?"

"Seriously? Don't you know your history?" Propeller stared at the head of Trannis again, with a sense of not _quite_ respect. This was like looking directly at history, or seeing a window straight into the past. This was something old, long before his time, and not exactly something he wanted to get directly associated with.

"He was one of us. A Decepticon. One of the first, even." The historical records set into mandatory simulation games, encoded into children's series and stories, and all the other methods to get young sparklings to _want_ to learn history in a way that made them understandable without compromising their utility to the Decepticon cause, it came back to Propeller. It was a little like diving back into a pool with many squirmy, slippery things in the water, and some of them certainly with nasty teeth.

Generally speaking, early Decepticons often did not have the finest of records. (It was claimed that they broke off from Lord Megatron's leadership, perpetuating terrible acts for the good of Cybertron and acting without his sanction. The possibility that they had done so on Megatron's orders anyway, and the histories lied to make it sound nicer, had certainly occurred to him. Propeller preferred to think that Lord Megatron had understood the complexity of the revolution and had done what seemed necessary to build something better. It didn't help Propeller's guilty feelings much.)

"An old pit boss, who ran the soldier's militias in Kaon," Propeller said, trying to sum up what he had been taught. "He used to be a gladiator, back when the pit fights were technically legal. Before that, he'd been a soldier in one of the wars with the Quintesson Co-Prosperity Sphere. Got highly decorated, and I guess that's why they let him get away with a lot. A lot of the stuff he did wasn't exactly legal, but it set up room for the pitfights where Lord Megatron refined his skills and attracted the first Decepticons. Trannis joined him there after... some stuff, I'm not exactly, to be honest. The history stuff doesn't go about it into detail, but it seems like there was a lot of politics stuff and big adventures to earn his respect."

"Probably," Grindjack agreed. "Trannis certainly has a lot of scars... guess he was a soldier, way back when. So what happened?"

"Well, when Lord Megatron got him on his side, Trannis still had a lot of military people listening to him. Not high command or the big militias in any region, but plenty of experienced soldiers, people he had trained back in the day, disgruntled revolutionaries, and exiles hiding out in the far reaches. Enough of those people came when Trannis called them in, and the ones who stuck around became the backbone of our people's first battle units and military forces. Like that's how the first of the Combaticons signed up."

"Ooh, I never heard that!" Grindjack said, much impressed.

"But Trannis wasn't exactly popular after the Autobot and Decepticon revolution against the Functionalists got started. Trannis didn't have a lot of respect for Lord Megatron or his inner circle; he thought they were too inexperienced and he wasn't getting the respect he deserved. I'm not totally sure how it happened, but he got fed up and started doing stuff to impress people and win glory." Propeller hesitated. "He... was pretty nasty about it."

"Uh, by what standards, exactly?"

Propeller stared at the head again. He wondered if those optics were now seeing fresh torments in some awful corner of the pit. Perhaps they were merited. "He took control of an entire section of Tarn, blew down the buildings to barricade everyone in there, shot down anyone who tried to fly out, and turned the entire place into a little fiefdom after he... killed everyone who was already there."

"What?"

"First he wanted them to give their allegiance to Lord Megatron," Propeller said. "They didn't answer fast enough. So he, uh. Just killed them all. Every single one." He swallowed again. He was finding it hard to look at Trannis' head again, but for different reasons than before. "Down to the last sparkling. He melted the bodies down to start minting new drones. And there were Decepticons there anyway, and he never bothered to find out. He said everyone was guilty. Just to make an impression to his rivals." Propeller frowned tightly. "He ended up coming back to Lord Megatron with the army of Vehicons he made from the dead, and he eventually ended up being sent to Simfur when a chieftain declared war against the Decepticons. He disappeared after that. Trannis, I mean. I know he was declared killed in action, but I never heard how exactly."

"I guess he had it coming," Grindjack said. He looked at the head of Trannis again. "I thought he was a Decepticon. What's he doing acting like a bad guy?" He scrunched up in a whole-body frown. "And there's that Simfur name again. Whoever killed him, their name was... uh, it's not Trapjaw but it's... I dunno. I've seen it somewhere."

"I, I wish I knew why he was doing bad stuff like that." Propeller tried not to think too much about the unkindness of history. "Even so... did he really deserve to die like this? They _tore him apart!_ "

Grindjack looked away, perhaps to not see the awful sight anymore, and froze. "He wasn't the only one. Don't look, bro. Don't look."

Propeller looked. It would have been hard not to after hearing something like that.

More heads. Many more heads, mounted on the walls. _Cybertronian_ heads, Decepticon heads from the insignias on them. Others were not, perhaps unaligned, and still others were even Autobot; yet on those, their insignias have been carefully and angrily removed, scratched out or chewed off. All of these new trophies had been savagely torn apart, like Trannis had been.

"...Oh."

"I'm starting to think that maybe we should get out of here after all," Grindjack said. He nudged his brother with a little tendril. "Come on. This is a seriously _bad place._ We can, I don't know... get outside, call for help, rally up when they send real soldiers to fight. We can help them, but this kind of thing is way over our heads."

"But, it's not right to just leave, not now."

"Bro, _please_." Grindjack slowly floated back down, taking Propeller with him. "This isn't just a crashed ship. This is something out of, I don't know, a horror thing or something! This is bad stuff, really bad! This ship is built for giants or something, giants with _claws_ and, and teeth, I saw fang marks on some of those heads! This isn't a ship of Autobots and enemy aliens or something real like this, this ship has got _monsters on it!_ They'll eat us alive or skin us to wear like little fancy hats! _I don't want to be a fancy hat at a monster tea party!_ "

Propeller blinked. "What's a tea party?"

"I don't know. Heard a nebulon talking about it once. But I don't want to find out first hand, I am not gonna be a fancy hat at a, a social occasion where they get really intense about spelling contests!"

"That sounds like literally the most boring party ever."

"Exactly! So can we _please_ go?! I don't want to go to the Allspark and tell anyone that I got killed by giant cannibal monsters who turned me into a hat for super-boring parties. No one would ever stop laughing! And you! Eh. They'd turn you into a, a cup cozy or something."

"A cup cozy!? That's just sad!"

"Well, you're so tiny," Grindjack said reasonably. "Probably you wouldn't even be more than a mouthful for them. Even after they skin you there won't be much left."

"Primus but you get morbid when you're freaked out."

Grindjack probably would have normally stuck his tongue out, amid mild bewilderment from bystanders (tongues, as such, being a super-weird physical trait that most Transformers didn't have, vocal processors being suitable for speech and not the primitive molding of air with muscular twists), had he been in his robot mode. He made do with hovering sulkily.

"Look," Propeller said while the moment was still good. "We can't leave yet. We still got a job to do."

"Dude! I just literally spelled out all the ways that is an _incredibly bad idea!_ We are on a ship of probably giant monsters who take people's heads off, are super old, experienced enough to have taken out one of the founding Decepticons, and oh yeah, they're _crazy enough to kill people and take their heads as trophies!_ "

"Don't some people in high command do that?"

"Yeah but it's cool with them, it doesn't count if you do it to bad guys."

Propeller clicked irritably. "I dunno, mech, that sounds like... I dunno, how do you say it, that thing when something is bad when someone else does but when you do it, it's okay just because it's you?"

"Narrative-centered morality?"

"I dunno. Maybe? I just, it doesn't sound right, okay?" A bit of inventiveness seized him and he said, "And neither does running out on this fight. What'll we say if we run now and missed out on a totally righteous fight that we could have won! Or lost, but died in a totally awesome way! That's pretty much the same thing!"

"No it's not!" Grindjack pouted. Trying to think of a way to put this properly, he failed to notice that his weight suddenly shifted dramatically, as if losing a burden. "Look, bro. There's fights you can win, and fights you can't. You get us into those kinds of fights all the time, like when you poked Screamqueen in the eye when she was asleep because you wanted to see if she was a morning person, or when you and Bhanibhel stole a looted war machine from a scrapyard and ran it right through some rich people buildings for... I don't remember, a political statement? Modern art exhibit? Oh, right, someone totally dared you guys to. And she plugged herself into the thing, she didn't drive it like you did. Man, that was weird to watch. You're a Transformer, you shouldn't drive! Driving is for pedestrians and organics and people who lose control of metaphors."

Grindjack was by this point floating nearer to the ground, and a lot lighter than he had been. "And that reminds me of all the times we went snooping around those weird old buildings that really don't belong on this planet. Like, older than the Decepticon inhabitations, Bhanibhel said they were. Phooey, I say, that don't make any sense! It'd mean the government was lying to us! More than usual, I mean. All governments lie, especially organic ones. But not robot ones, we're more awesome and stuff. Or is this treason talk? I can never tell. Oh man, I hope no one is listening on this!" Beseechingly Grindjack said to empty space, "If anyone is listening in on this, I promise I didn't mean any of that! I was... reading someone's spy thriller fan fic. No, really. I was. But you don't want to see it, it's got totally nasty pairing and alternate universe junk and seriously creepy kinks. Like, _organic/robot pairings._ Robot to meat conversion plot points! Is that gross or what? You should probably get away from the screen before you get sick. Also, be a friend and delete the whole conversation. Don't want your supervisor seeing this and concluding you're into some sick stuff! I am horrified to know you're into this. Just, ew, mech."

He reached the ground. Automatically, he assumed his quadrupedal robot mode. He barked in some relief, he had missed his legs. "...And I feel like I'm missing something." He looked up.

Propeller wasn't on his back anymore, and had apparently left a while ago.

Grindjack looked around. "Oh mech, not again!" He looked up at the trophies, as if Propeller was hopping along on top of them (it wouldn't be the first time he had used horrible corpses as stepping stones to punch something), but he wasn't there. He looked around the corridor, but didn't see his brother anywhere.

He growled. "Dang it, not again! _Stop running off in scary places!_ "


End file.
